13 - Classics and Romantics

Summary

The section’s closing chapter discusses the polemic between Classics and Romantics, which, despite local differences and its lack of traction in Britain, helped crystallise Romanticism in many countries both as a national and as a pan-European cultural phenomenon. Beginning with contradictory statements by Stendhal and Goethe, it argues that the Classic-Romantic nexus not only contributed to the meaning of ‘romantic’ but also of ‘classic’. The first did not replace the other, but instead complexified it by re-appropriating texts from antiquity. The chapter first shows how eighteenth-century philology informed discussions of modern culture in critical texts by F. Schlegel and Schiller, and in A.W. Schlegel’s lectures. These in turn informed Staël’s influential statements in De l’Allemagne and in her letter on translation, which fired up Romanticism in Italy, as well as Stendhal’s ‘Racine et Shakespeare’, which did the same in France. The author touches on the ideological role of translation, but also of Romantic philology and of philhellenism, showing how the Romantics in Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Poland, and Russia re-appropriated the classics. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of Hölderlin’s Hyperion to show Romanticism’s reluctance to differentiate the classic from the modern.