George MacDonald powerfully influenced modern fantasy fiction, beginning with his contemporaries Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, and Howard Pyle and continuing into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with writers ranging from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to David Lindsay and Susanna Clarke. Much of that influence has to do with MacDonald’s ability to invest scenes with dreamlike intensity and mystery. In a MacDonald story, objects glimmer with half-sensed significance and undergo startling transformations. His narratives sometimes defy waking logic but always have the inevitability and urgency of dream. W. H. Auden identified MacDonald’s gift as ‘what one might call his dream realism, his exact and profound knowledge of dream causality, dream logic, dream change, dream morality’.

‘Tales of the Peasantry and Famine’ finds the term ‘peasant’ to be both problematic in occluding the complexity of Irish rural society, and, at the same time, inescapable, with the Irish peasants recurring in Irish fiction throughout the nineteenth century. Peasants feature across a range of popular genres of the period, including the historical novel, such as John Banims’ Boyne Water (1826), the national tale, and in novels specifically about peasant life, of which the works of William Carleton provide the best-known examples. The Famine of the 1840s accelerated this interest in Irish peasant culture as a disappearing world, as the numbers of the rural poor were decimated by hunger, disease, and emigration, also giving rise to a series of novels focusing on the Famine itself, notably Carleton’s Black Prophet (1847). By the end of the century, Emily Lawless’ Hurrish (1886) would treat the pre-Famine period as a lost time.

‘Irish Children’s Novels in the Nineteenth Century’ identifies a focus on a couple of key themes: home, adventure, and selfhood, within which there is remarkable scope. Underlying most of these novels is an educational project, which evolves from the training of the well-behaved child early in the century to the formation of national subjects by the 1890s, in novels such as Rosa Mulholland’s The Girls of Banshee Castle (1895). At the same time, both forms of children’s fiction typically evoke the wonder of childhood, a concern inherited from the romantic idealisation of the child. Situated between these poles of formation and wonder, we find the nineteenth-century Irish children’s novel – a dynamic captured in the title of the earliest Irish printed book for children, the anonymously published The History of Harry Spencer, Compiled for the Amusement of Good Children and the Instruction of Such Who Wish to Become Good (1794).

Interlude 2 compares the lives and ideas of Radhabinod Pal and Samuel Eisenstadt. Both were shaped by the political upheavals of 1905 in Europe and Asia. They both devoted parts of their academic works to defending their respective religious legal systems, Hindu and Jewish law, against Western evolutionary narratives, seeking to downplay hierarchical elements such as caste structure or gender inequality that existed in these systems, and both embraced a vision of the legal past aimed to challenge Western cultural dominance. However, Pal portrayed Hindu law as a stabilizing force, while Eisenstadt, a socialist-turned-communist, cast Jewish law as revolutionary and egalitarian. Another difference between them was that while Pal, influenced by English jurisprudence, was uninterested in the idea of legal revival, Eisenstadt, who assimilated the ideas of the German Historical School, actively promoted Jewish law as a foundation for Israel’s legal system. The interlude ends with a reflection on the way Pal and Eisenstadt used their respective religious legal traditions to construct utopian alternatives to Western law, idealizing Hindu and Jewish law, and overlooking the flaws in their traditions.

This chapter reopens the archive of so-called romantic Arabic poetry to ask “how romantic,” both as a question of definition (how was it romantic, exactly?) and as a question of degree (how romantic was it, really?). Drumsta offers a few microscopic glimpses at the archive of interwar Egyptian poetry and criticism that illustrate how dramatically aesthetic theories, poetic terminology, and critical “frames of reference” – to borrow a term from Einstein’s special theory of relativity – were shifting in this period, and not necessarily or always in the direction of the romantic. First, Drumsta analyzes the second of two essays by the poet and critic ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (1889–1964) titled “Shawqī in the Balance” (Shawqī fī al-Mīzān) from the 1920–1921 periodical al-Dīwān. Although al-ʿAqqād does not specifically invoke Einstein or relativity in al-Dīwān, his willingness to strike so decisively at the basic foundations of Arabic poetry and aesthetics mirrors Einstein’s approach to his period’s widely accepted principles of physics, and in this, the chapter suggests, al-ʿAqqād is a decidedly modern thinker.

This chapter explores the external influences that have shaped the symphony in Britain and Ireland from 1900 to the present, focusing on how composers engaged with styles, techniques and cultural forces outside the traditional Austro-German symphonic tradition. It considers two broad categories: stylistic techniques present in local musical traditions, such as folk music and Renaissance polyphony, and international influences ranging from Sibelius and serialism to electronic music and post-imperial cultural exchange. The symphony in the British Isles is framed as a flexible medium – simultaneously conservative and adaptive – capable of assimilating modernist, popular and global idioms. Particular attention is given to the deep and lasting impact of Sibelius, alongside responses to continental modernism and emerging polystylist approaches. Rather than forming a singular school, British and Irish symphonic writing reflects a patchwork of individual voices negotiating complex cultural, political and musical inheritances in ways that have kept the genre relevant and richly varied into the twenty-first century.

Chapter 18 offers a deep examination of José de Alencar’s Iracema, unpacking its cultural and literary significance through three key lenses: the novel’s critical reception, the local and foreign influences that shaped Alencar’s vision, and the portrayal of Iracema as “Brazil’s national poem.” The novel’s reception stretches from the critiques of Sílvio Romero to those of Haroldo de Campos, while its inspirations draw on Rousseau’s philosophy, Walter Scott’s historical novels, and perceptions of the Brazilian nature as expressed by Karl von Martius and Almeida Garrett. These threads weave together to form the novel celebrated as “Brazil’s national poem.” Together, these perspectives create a rich “biography” of Iracema, charting its origins and tracing its lasting mark on Brazilian culture.

Chapter 3 explores Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s Memórias de um sargento de milícias, published in 1852–53. It explains the novel’s political messages, which were subtly shared with its original readers, allowing modern audiences to interpret Almeida’s story similarly. The chapter highlights the use of a trompe l’œil effect that recreates the political scene from the “time of the king” (1808–21), offering a sharp but indirect critique of Brazil’s social and political situation in the 1850s – as one era reflects the other. While earlier studies mostly focused on the novel’s social aspects, this chapter uncovers a clearer political meaning grounded in real events rather than guesswork. Regarding race, although Memórias de um sargento de milícias includes non-white characters, its satirical style prevents it from directly tackling racial issues, especially slavery.

This final and concluding chapter highlights the main points discussed in the book and explains the importance that Early German Romanticism can have in the ecological and environmental-philosophical debate today.

In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

Life was conceived by the Romantics as the underlying force of nature, and they sought to identify its norms and rules of transformation. For them, life oscillates between contraction and relaxion, between potentiality and actuality. Life establishes and renews the norms they set. However, these sequences do not only lead to the form of living beings. Life is immanent and its creations flourish in every sphere. As we will see in this chapter, this idea of ‘life’ prompted the Romantics to focus on rhythm and habit, as the way in which life gives itself a dynamic order. Habit is the key for the Romantic reformulation of the political lexicon: it enhances sociability; individualities are not isolated beings but rather carry in themselves the inexhaustible transformative forces of life that deploy in and outside the individual. The individual is therefore always influenced by the context. For this reason, her freedom is not formulated as autonomy but rather as creativity or wisdom. This interpretation of ‘freedom’ bridges the gap between humans and nature and demonstrates that, in order to rethink our relationship with nature, we have to reformulate our political concepts.

The Romantic Self is constituted by otherness, by relations that are in constant transformation. In the preceding pages, this issue has been addressed with a particular focus on the relationship between the self and nature. In this part of the book, we shall see that the same applies to the relationship between the self and history: the I cannot separate herself from, or impose herself on, the historical conditions in which she emerges; rather, these are part of the Romantic Self. In this chapter, in particular, I will show that the ‘defective’ essence of the Romantic Self hinders her to impose her sovereign will on the development of historical events. This is reflected in her incapacity to bring into unity the fragmentation of the modern age (described by Friedrich Schlegel through an opposition to the ancient epoch) and in the impossibility to interpret history as a manifestation of human progress. The absence of a unitary line in history challenges the hermeneutics of the present, too: on this, Schlegel’s genealogical perspective wants to give a solution.

The chapter focuses on the Romantic philosophy of nature. This will permit us to point out how the relational idea of the Romantic Self is consistent with the image of the human being as located within nature. The human is not opposed to nature and is neither her master, but she is immersed in (and even constituted by) the entanglement of natural forces. Following a line of reflections that unites Spinoza, Leibniz, Herder, and Goethe to the Romantics, I will show the centrality of ‘life’. This is the inexhaustible source of forms created through repetitions and metamorphoses. As we will see at the end of the chapter, the Romantic interpretation of life is at the basis not only of their anthropology but also of their idea of normativity. Norms are, for the Romantics, instructions provided with a compelling force and are not only the formulation of interdictions. The dynamic conception of nature allowed the Romantics to reintegrate human beings into it and overcome the opposition between nature and freedom, nature and politics; however, a distinction between human and animal, or human and plants, is maintained. It is, though, not maintained in the sense of domination.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

This chapter explains how the Romantic gnoseology goes together with the concept of a dependent subjectivity. Indeed, the Romantics imagine their ontology as based on relationships (rather than on identity) and, consequently, the self as entangled in a mesh of reciprocal dependencies. This perspective on the Romantic gnoseology begins with the notion of ‘experiment’, which for the Romantics is a genetic method through which the subject–object dualism is undermined. Thinking of philosophy as an experiment implied, for them, accepting that the human being does not dominate nature but is instead constantly influenced by it. The deep relationship between the knower and the known is manifested in feeling, which reveals the primordial connection between subject and object and is at the core of the relational idea of the self. The relational ontology underlying the Romantic conception of feeling is even more evident in their analysis of love as a universal force that unites beings to and in the Absolute. Love designates the network of relationships constitutive of Being, of which the self is not the apex.

In the first half of the nineteenth century a great deal of polemical writing on religious issues was published, notably from two radical groups within English Christianity. Both groups aimed ‘to make religion a living power in a cold and gloomy age’, but adopted very different approaches, expressed not only in formal theological treatises but also in more ‘popular’ formats such as the periodical press. John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey – leaders of the Oxford Movement that emerged in the 1830s – tried to bring their own imagined version of the Middle Ages into the Church of England: a ‘vision glorious’ that to many smacked of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, others, who might be described as ‘evangelical’ (such as Edward Bickersteth, ‘the Keble of Victorian Evangelicalism’, or the charismatic Edward Irving), insisted on their own understanding of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In this chapter it will be demonstrated that the Late Modern English lexicons of both groups were profoundly impacted by Romanticism, as expressed most comprehensively in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter is devoted to the Romantic women philosophers, and it groups their reflections on subjectivity. This chapter aims to identify a common thread that unites these women thinkers and contributes to the understanding of the Romantic Self. Despite the diversity of their perspectives, they shared a common understanding of the self as shaped by relationships with others and nature, and as incapable of imposing herself on them, a view that echoes arguments presented by the men philosophers of Romanticism. However, these women thinkers tend to focus on a particular point: the possibility for the self to create a space for her own voice and, on occasion, her actions. After the explanation of Sophie Mereau’s notion of agency, and the differences between her and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s political thought, the chapter focuses on Mereau’s and de Staël’s interpretations of Fichte's philosophy and their idea of autonomy. The role of memory and love in Sophie Tieck's and Dorothea Veit’s conception of the self is then analysed. The chapter closes with Günderrode’s and Bettina von Arnim’s notion of subjectivity, and its relationship with nature and society.

The chapter-length Introduction establishes the historical and philosophical contexts for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion. A section on David Hume’s skeptical views on “perswasion” and the influential response to them by the Scottish rhetorician and minister George Campbell draws important terminological distinctions and delineates key features of the inquiries and reimaginings addressed in the chapters that follow. The main features of the concept of malleable persuasion are described and differentiated from adjacent concepts in works by Lord Byron, Edmund Burke, and Mary Shelley, among others. The book is situated in relation to major lines of scholarship on Romantic cultures of controversy, secular casuistry, and the histories of belief and skepticism. The chapter ends by addressing the distinctly literary dimensions of persuasion, including the role of reading in its representation and elicitation, and the formal resources involved across genres.

This chapter looks at Thomas Moore’s attempts to maintain a midway point between post-Napoleonic conservatism and emerging radical reform movements. It looks at his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the context of wider debates about the nature of Whiggism and its suitability to the political moment. Moore’s attempts at moderation ran aground on the shores of Irish history, as his work increasingly moved to prose in order to make explicit political tensions that had been implicit in his poetry.