European Romanticism: A Brief History With Documents

As the nineteenth century began, western Europe was swept by one of the great cultural shifts of the modern era: the Romantic movement. Warren Breckman's volume examines the history of Romanticism as a political, literary, and philosophical movement that exerted a significant influence on modern attitudes toward art, science, and religion. Incorporating both creative and critical writings from English, German, French, and Italian Romantic authors, as well as visual art of the Romantic era, Breckman demonstrates the crucial role of emergent nationalism within the Romantic movement, but also makes clear the transnational connections that made Romanticism a movement of international scope. This complex and wide-ranging cultural phenomenon is made accessible for undergraduates by an extensive introduction and contextualized by clear document headnotes. A chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography provide further resources for students.

WARREN BRECKMAN (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been awarded the Richard S. Dunn Award for Distinguished Teaching. A cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe, his other books include Karl Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (1999) and a forthcoming study of twentieth-century post-Marxist French political philosophy. Breckman has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and a visiting scholar at the ?cole des Hautes ?tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and he has received fellowships from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.