The historically overlapping discourses of romanticism and aesthetics frequently draw criticism for being mere ideology. “Ideology” here refers to a restricted worldview that misrecognizes itself as universal and suggests why romanticism is crucial to debates about world literature. Insisting on aesthetics as universal, romanticism helps to initiate a Eurocentric conception of world literature. But this criticism ignores the often-conflicted character of romantic writing in which an aesthetic machinery exposes universalism as built on exploitation. To fully grasp the stakes of such breakdowns one must further consider romantic-era texts that are not European. An exemplary instance is Hérard Dumesle’s 1824 political travel narrative Voyage dans le Nord D’Hayti. Drawing on European models, it proves paradoxically revealing in its account of Eurocentric aesthetics. Endorsing and ironizing universalism, it opens onto alternative conceptions of world literature by marking the limits of translatability and refusing to belong to any one world.