>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2026 (36) 71
ABSTRACT (en)
This thematic issue reconsiders Romanticism through a transnational lens. It challenges the tendency to organise literary and artistic production along national lines, and instead argues that Romanticism participates in the formation of imagined communities that exceed the nation-state. In this account, literary and artistic agency emerge as relational, dynamic, and more-than-national. Accordingly, Romantic literary and artistic production is organised in terms not of national boundaries, but of the circulation of texts, images, ideas, and people across linguistic, political, and cultural borders. The issue envisions “the border” less as a dividing line than as a series of porous nodes that reveal the mobility and hybridity at the heart of Romantic culture. Drawing on recent scholarship on global, imperial, and comparative Romanticisms, the volume reframes Romantic creative practices within fluid networks shaped by translation, travel, exile, correspondence, print culture, and visual exchange. It shows how Romantic identities – be they authorial, artistic, or political – were negotiated within these transnational spaces, and how such negotiations unsettled forming models of national belonging. The volume also highlights the importance of revolution, imperial expansion, and broader geopolitical change in shaping Romantic conceptions of art and authorship. Across literary and visual studies, it emphasises how Romantic works both represent and perform processes of border-crossing that resist cultural insularity. Rather than considering transnationalism as simply one feature of Romanticism, the issue shows how it sheds new light on both canonical and lesser-known literary and visual works.
KEYWORDS (en)
romanticism, transnationalism, border-crossing, travel, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, literature, visual culture
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2026.71.1
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Editions, 1983.
Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971.
Bowers, Will. The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Chander, Manu Samriti. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019.
Chao, Shun-Liang and John Michael Corrigan, eds. Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Cox, Jeffrey N. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
de Staël-Holstein, Germaine. De l’Allemagne. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Vol. 2. Paris: Nicolle, 1814.
Duff, David et al. “Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable.” In Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities, edited by Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron, 227–72. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021.
Duffy, Cian and Robert Rix. “Introduction: ‘A Sealed Book to the World at Large.’” In Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation, edited by Cian Duffy and Robert Rix, xix–xxxviii. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Gellner, Ernest. Nation and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Griffin, Patrick. The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2023.
Gottlieb, Evan. Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014.
Halmi, Nicholas. The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hamilton, Paul. Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003.
Hamilton, Paul. Orientation in European Romanticism: The Art of Falling Upwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Haywood, Ian and Diego Saglia, eds. Spain in British Romanticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Kitson, Peter J. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Lovejoy, A.O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticism.” PMLA 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–53.
Makdisi, Saree. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Møller, Lis. The Ballad Revival in Romantic-Era Britain, Germany and Scandinavia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
Saglia, Diego. European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Sandy, Mark. Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
Swift, Simon. “British Romanticism and Europe.” European Romantic Review 36, no. 4 (2025): 513–21.
Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Vincent, Patrick. “Introduction: Inventing a European Romanticism.” In The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature, edited by Patrick Vincent, 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Vincent, Patrick. Romanticism, Republicanism, and the Swiss Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Wallach, Alan and Andrew Hemingway, eds. Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.
Watt, James. British Orientalisms, 1759–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Wellek, René. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History.” Comparative Literature 1, no. 2 (Spring 1949): 147–72.
Wellek, René. “German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation.” Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1964): 35–56.
Wiley, Michael. Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
