Romanticism in the Age of World Wars: Introduction to the Forum

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other era in literary historiography, Romanticism is defined by war; its pivotal dates anchored in key junctures of wars then raging in the background. The commonly accepted system of dating Romanticism thus alleges that the period properly started as new modes of thought and expression took root following the French Revolution of 1789, developed through the ensuing seven Wars of the Coalitions from 1792, and began to peter out when the latter ended in 1815, to conclude entirely around 1830. The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, serves as a convenient turning point, typically taken to signpost the transition from wartime to peacetime: it defined the nature of modern warfare in an event of unprecedented and unrepeated proportions, involving some “200,000 men . . . on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles) square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield” (Barbero 311). A landmark moment in the history of modern war, Waterloo can also be read as signaling the decline of Romanticism. From about 1815, Romantic thought is seen to divide against itself; into a precursor phase of confident, self-possessed production, followed by a secondary wind-down period marked by hesitant, self-deprecating reproduction (Nemoianu). This oft-alleged deflation of Romanticism following the conclusion of hostilities in 1815 holds a disquieting implication: war appears to be a necessary condition for Romanticism to inhabit itself fully. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly observes in his 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude,” Romantic poetry originates in war, which exercises the passions and the imagination as it is brought home through a fast-expanding machinery of periodical publication. In Coleridge’s reading, Romantic literature operates an aesthetic ideology which converts violence and conflict into bracing messages of sympathetic national unity, leaving behind the realities of war as a destabilizing if largely unobserved remainder: