The vexed question of what the Romantics themselves said about Romanticism has been approached in a number of different ways, but their major public declarations have never been gathered together. Indeed, with the exception of a few of these (such as Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare), this body of evidence has been unavailable to the English-speaking audience. Many of these manifestos are translated here for the first time: the remaining are newly translated for this collection. Taken together, they show Romanticism as a coherent and unified movement appearing in pulses throughout Eastern and Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, with a continual spiritual kinship to Schlegelian origins.
