We tend to rehearse familiar narratives with the aid of familiar writing about plants, but a turn to the non-canonical helps us to understand those canonical works in rather different ways. This chapter argues that we should be alive to those longue durée yet intimate traditions that are so often the stuff of lone engagements with individual plants, and which are most often expressed as moments of intense emotion. The chapter also suggests that we should at least question that other familiar narrative of a newly discovered ‘Romantic’ transcendence: turning to moments of emotional engagement with plants both in earlier writing and in writing outside of the ‘Romantic’ tradition, helps us to recognise a much longer tradition of transcendent emotion of which the Romantics are only a part.

The Johnson legend owes most to James Boswell, yet despite writing the classic biography Boswell only knew Johnson in the last twenty-one years of his life, and less well than other biographers. There were also several short biographies, part of a vast literature on Johnson which was already sizeable in his lifetime. Much of it was hostile: he was caricatured as inhuman, dictatorial, and aggressive. Boswell, notwithstanding the brilliance of his account, was partly to blame for cementing this idea: he privileged Johnson as a debater over the other sides of a very complicated personality, and sometimes turned Johnson’s conversations into monologues. The Romantics, who despised Johnson’s literary principles, amplified this caricature, and the nineteenth century was in general a low point of Johnson’s critical reputation. Yet his books were widely read in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth he won many admirers among both scholars and authors.

Wedderburn’s final pamphlet, Address to the Lord Brougham and Vaux, contributed to the early nineteenth-century political “war of representation” about whether Black people in the West Indies would be willing to work for wages after emancipation. Although seeming to reiterate the proslavery claim that enslaved people in the West Indies had better living conditions than European wage laborers, Wedderburn’s vision of dwelling on the land outlined a nuanced, speculative decolonial future. The Conclusion finally argues that narratives of the Romantic revolutionary age should include Black abolitionist geographies, a revolution cultivated on common land with pigs, pumpkins, and yams.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.

Frederik Van Dam argues that the conceptualisation of new, ethical forms of cosmopolitanism in the 1850s is apparent in the informal diplomatic practices of Richard Monckton Milnes, an unduly neglected figure who was central to the literary world of the decade. Milnes’s ‘diplomatic cosmopolitanism’ found expression in his bibliophile activities as well as in his engagement with the legacy of European Romanticism, as can be seen in occasional poems such as ‘A Monument for Scutari’ (1855) and in his reviews of European fiction about Bohemia. Examining how the 1850s marked a new stage in the conduct of international affairs, Van Dam considers developments in the circulation of commodities as well as the breakdown of the so-called concert of Europe. Monckton Milnes embodies the diplomatic possibilities for literature and culture on the eve of a new European order.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

The final Chapter argues that Grouchy should be seen as a red thread that ties eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century thought. She allows us to see the ideas that emerged following the Revolution not as a caesura, but as a continuation of earlier preoccupations. Using the example of Benjamin Constant, who was a close friend and interlocutor with Grouchy, it argues that the stress placed by Constant and others on the political importance of sympathy was not a Romantic rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, but the perpetuation of an eighteenth-century grappling with how sentiments could be combined with reason to act as a means of uniting the individual and the community, and therefore as a foundation for political society. In the case of Constant, Grouchy was a significant conduit for these ideas. The Chapter explores how many of Constant’s major texts of the period 1800–1815 engaged in various ways with Grouchy’s concept of ‘particular sympathy’, and the potential threat that it poses to the proper development of moral ideas. It suggests, moreover, that Constant’s idea of ‘religious sentiment’ was an alternative solution to the problem posed by particular sympathy, equivalent to Grouchy’s turn to aesthetic philosophy.

This chapter introduces the essays in the volume, which work through various understandings of “romanticism” and “race,” addressing how these terms acquire meaning via other concepts taking shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as “blackness,” “whiteness,” “sovereignty,” “property,” and “freedom.”

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

Chapter 2 surveys extant theories of the nation and outlines the main positions in the historiographical debate. It begins with the primordial theories first posited by German Romantics, before turning to the “dominant orthodoxy,” modernism. It remains widely accepted that the nation is a distinctly modern type of community, the product of the profound intellectual and structural changes Western Europe underwent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The chapter draws attention to the role of the state in modernist theories to explain why nations are generally defined as sovereign political communities. Medieval historians for their part have contested the modern dating of the emergence of nations and provided plentiful evidence for the existence of national communities prior to the sixteenth century. Even so, many scholars adhere to a political conception of the nation. The chapter highlights a tendency among medievalists to gauge the presence and cohesion of medieval nations principally by their degree of political institutionalization and discusses the anachronism of previous approaches to nationhood, thus illustrating the historiographical relevance of the study.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

Clare had the good fortune to be born into a period of excitement and experimentation in poetry. Ideas about poetry were changing, as were practices of reading and writing. This chapter examines how Clare participated in these changes. He helped to elevate the meditative lyric to the pinnacle of literary prestige by showing how everyday experiences yield pleasure and insight; by using forms with roots in oral and folk cultures, including popular song; and by modelling his poems on the music of nature and the structure of bird nests. He took part in contemporary experiments with form, language, and voice. His poems draw on the philosophical atmosphere of the Romantic age by offering readers opportunities carefully to observe Clare’s world and, by doing so, to come to know it.