Romanticism by Country: The National Variations of a Global Movement

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

Romanticism was a transnational movement, but it took strikingly different forms in different national cultures. The German Romantics produced the most ambitious theoretical work and some of the strangest, most beautiful literature of the age; the English Romantics gave the movement its most enduring lyric poetry; the French Romantics created its most spectacular theatrical and novelistic forms; the American Romantics developed a distinctive fusion of European Romanticism with the experience of the New World; and the Russian and Latin American Romantics transformed the inheritance of Western Europe into some of the most original literature of the nineteenth century.

German Romanticism

German Romanticism was the theoretical heartland of the movement. The group of writers who gathered in Jena in the 1790s — Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, and the philosophers Fichte and Schelling — produced the major theoretical statements of the movement, including Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony and his influential fragments in the journal Athenäum (1798–1800).

The great writers of German Romanticism include the following.

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — author of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the great play Faust (published in full only in 1832), and a vast body of lyric poetry that ranges from the simple songs of Wilhelm Meister to the visionary “late poems.”
• Friedrich Schiller — playwright and aesthetic theorist, author of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and the “Ode to Joy” later set to music by Beethoven.
• Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) — author of the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the visionary “Hymns to the Night,” and many fragments.
• E.T.A. Hoffmann — author of the tales collected as The Golden Pot and The Sandman, and of the opera Undine. Hoffmann was a major influence on the French Symbolists, on Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, and on Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty.
• Heinrich von Kleist — author of the plays Penthesilea and The Prince of Homburg and the novella Michael Kohlhaas. Kleist is one of the most original and unsettling writers of the period.
• Heinrich Heine — the great lyric poet of the next generation, whose bitter, ironic verse helped bridge German Romanticism and modernism.

German Romanticism also extended east, decisively shaping the development of Russian Romanticism and even, through a long chain of intermediaries, Latin American Romanticism.

English Romanticism

English Romanticism is the most familiar form of the movement to the English-speaking world. It is usually organized around two generations of poets. The “first generation” includes William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake. The “second generation” includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and, sometimes, Robert Southey.

The major works of English Romanticism include:

• The 1798 Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the founding text of English Romantic poetry.
• Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850), the great work of English Romantic autobiography.
• Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
• Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and his prophetic books.
• Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, the founding texts of the Byronic hero.
• Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and the great odes and shorter lyrics.
• Keats’s odes, “Lamia,” and the unfinished epic Hyperion.

English Romanticism extended into the novel in two distinct directions: the historical novel of Walter Scott, the Gothic novel of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, and Mary Shelley, and the social comedy of Jane Austen. The relationship between Austen and Romanticism remains one of the most debated topics in English literary history.

French Romanticism

French Romanticism emerged later than its German and English counterparts and was shaped by the long shadow of the Revolution and Napoleon. The major figures include:

• François-René de Chateaubriand — author of Atala (1801) and René (1802), the works that established the melancholy, world-weary “Romantic hero” in French letters.
• Madame de Staël — theorist, novelist, and the author of De l’Allemagne (1810), which introduced German Romantic thought to the French reading public.
• Victor Hugo — the towering figure of French Romanticism, author of Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the lyrical plays, and the vast body of lyric poetry.
• Alexandre Dumas — author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
• Stendhal — author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, a founder of the modern psychological novel.
• Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval — the second generation of French Romantics.

The 1830 premiere of Hugo’s play Hernani at the Comédie-Française triggered a near-riot, a famous bataille romantique between classical and romantic factions that became a founding myth of French Romanticism.

American Romanticism

American Romanticism developed in dialogue with the European traditions but with a distinctive concern for the new American landscape, the new American democracy, and the dark underside of the new American republic. The major figures include:

• Washington Irving — author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the first American writer to gain international fame.
• James Fenimore Cooper — author of The Last of the Mohicans and a founder of American frontier fiction.
• Edgar Allan Poe — poet, critic, and inventor of the modern detective story; a key figure of dark romanticism.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne — author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
• Herman Melville — author of Moby-Dick, the great American Romantic epic.
• Walt Whitman — author of Leaves of Grass, whose free-verse celebration of the self and the body helped inaugurate modern American poetry.
• The American Transcendentalists — Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller — gave American Romanticism its philosophical depth and its connection to Transcendentalism.

Russian Romanticism

Russian Romanticism emerged in the early nineteenth century, deeply influenced by German Romantic thought and by the example of Byron. The great Russian Romantics include:

• Vasily Zhukovsky — the father of Russian Romanticism, translator of European Romantic poetry, and tutor to the future Tsar Alexander II.
• Alexander Pushkin — the founding figure of modern Russian literature, author of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, the play Boris Godunov, and the great narrative poems.
• Mikhail Lermontov — author of A Hero of Our Time and a major lyric poet.
• Fyodor Tyutchev — author of some of the most enduring short poems in the Russian language.
• Nikolai Gogol — a transitional figure between Romanticism and realism, author of Dead Souls and the great Petersburg tales.

Latin American Romanticism

Latin American Romanticism developed in the newly independent nations of the Americas during the nineteenth century, drawing on European models but adapting them to the realities of post-colonial Latin America. The major figures include the Cuban poet José María Heredia, the Colombian novelist Jorge Isaacs, the Argentine poet and short-story writer Esteban Echeverría, and many others. The movement gave Latin American literature its first great works and laid the groundwork for the modernist explosion of the early twentieth century.

The Global Reach of Romanticism

By the mid-nineteenth century, the influence of Romanticism was felt across the globe. The movement had helped to articulate the aspirations of new nations, the dreams of liberation, and the visions of poets, painters, musicians, and philosophers in every continent. To study Romanticism by country is to see how a single movement can be refracted through the most different historical experiences, and yet retain a recognizable family resemblance.

Further Reading

• The Cambridge Companion to European Romanticism (Cambridge, 2018, ed. Michael Ferber) — for the comparative European picture.
• The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford, 2022, ed. Paul Hamilton) — the most recent comprehensive reference.
• The Literatures of the World in English (Routledge) — for the global diffusion of the Romantic tradition.

Related Pages

• German Romanticism
• English Romanticism
• French Romanticism
• American Romanticism
• Russian Romanticism
• Latin American Romanticism
• The Legacy of Romanticism
• Romantic Nationalism