The notion that human beings are products of history, conditioned by particular and changing political, social, economic, material, and technological circumstances, is itself historicizable as an outlook that came to prominence in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. A historical and, indeed, historicizing self-consciousness informed new logics of division between old and new, premodern and modern, in the reorganization of knowledge as in the reconstitution of political life, in relation to secularizing shifts in the grounds of authority. Yet such historical self-consciousness was not uniform but multiform. From apocalyptic millenarianism to cyclical or stadial conceptions of historical change to linear models of progress to geologically informed notions of “deep time,” thinkers and writers of the Romantic period showed in sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping ways a common preoccupation with how human beings are situated in history and time.

“Slavery and abolition” are simultaneously ubiquitous and obscured in the Romantic era. While contemporary scholarship now makes slavery more apprehensible, it has also become a representative limit for what Blackness can mean and do in the period. The two sections in this chapter seek to revise Romantic notions of resistance and of libertation. The first, on slavery, looks to the period’s slave rebellions and figures of enslavement to propose new means of reading Romanticism and new modes of Romantic reading. The second looks to “abolition” for a revolutionary alternative to Romantic amelioration. Both sections turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “destituent power” to explore how slavery and abolition continue to trouble our ideas of captivity and liberation, institutionalization and revolution.

Philosophers, philologists, and poets of the Romantic period showed a distinct attentiveness to language as a nontransparent medium of thought and expression. Working in the wake of Locke’s 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding, with its third book entitled “Of Words,” Horne Tooke, Rousseau, and Herder developed theories about the origins and histories of languages. Friedrich August Wolf inaugurated modern philological study by approaching classical antiquity through historicist methods of textual editing and verification, and Orientalist scholars such as William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel expanded the study of languages and textual traditions to include those of Persia and India, with such an enterprise entangled, in varying ways, with the apparatus of European colonialism. Breakthroughs in hermeneutics (the branch of knowledge dealing with interpretation) and translation theory by Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, among others, took place in the context of the historicist and relativist turn in the approach to language and languages. William Wordsworth’s aim to write poetry “in the real language of men” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s caution that language may die for “the nobler purposes of human intercourse,” should no new poets create associations afresh, likewise evince a critical relationship to language.

This chapter uses the Romantic novel as a case study to consider the problem of genre in world literature studies. Examining different frameworks for thinking about the category of Romanticism in a global context, it suggests that the historical novel provides a clear illustration of how the boundaries of genre expand and contract in order to conform to reigning paradigms of literary history. After demonstrating how Sophia Lee’s The Recess problematizes the idea of historical fiction that it is said to inaugurate, the chapter briefly compares it to Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter in order to illuminate the criteria that come into play when positing whether these three texts should be considered as being of the same genre.

It is not much of a hyperbole to consider today how much the lived experience of people within and beyond Britain and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consisted of not simply Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution, but also his Ages of Capital and Empire. Romanticism as a period and as a literary impulse or collation of ideas is riven by assertions for radical emancipation as well as the witnessing of the predations of empire and dislocations of an ever-growing tangle of expropriating capitalist networks. It is an event and body of affect where the historical vertigo of the American, Haitian, and French Revolutions coexist together, along with the traumas of saltwater slavery and Western imperialism, as well as the antagonisms of empire as a collective but also heterogeneous historical force. In Romanticism, we find the emergence of modernity’s political vocabulary, in all its aspirations and contradictions, for both individual identity and larger national, and nationalist, formations. Both necessarily tied to but also distinct from questions of the historical and temporal, the reading of the political is perhaps where Romanticism and world literature have most recognizably met in interdisciplinary encounter, and where they continue to meet.

After elaborating in detail the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which results in the emblematic retrieval of the poet’s unburnt heart, Edward Trelawny concludes his account by noting how he “followed the practice of the Hindoos in using a funeral pyre,”1 something he presumably learned during his travels in India. One of the central narratives in English High Romanticism, one that preserves for later generations literally and figuratively the heart of one of its major poets, is thus enabled by, indebted to, a non-Western, non-European cultural practice that speaks to a realm of action, thought, words, and images that has become one of the most promising horizons shaping what now goes by the disciplinary name of world literature.

This chapter examines the imbrication of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century discourses on race and class, and thus of the formations of colonialism and capitalism, both within and beyond England as center of global empire and capital.  It performs readings of this imbrication in John Clare’s protestations against land enclosure in Northamptonshire in the Romantic period, and it shows how this nexus in Clare anticipates Palestinian protestations against the dispossession of ancestral land since 1948. In doing so, it juxtaposes resonant moments in connected histories of modernity and modernization that inform the history of global capitalism, which still enacts in many ways the racial antagonisms in Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

This chapter rearticulates its Romantic origins as a specificity of modern critical philology by turning to Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 novel Lucinde and Schleiermacher’s 1800 reading thereof in Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. It discerns in this pair of texts a founding scene of critical philology, in which the rules and criteria for interpretation are no longer assumed to be given in advance but are rather derived from the practice of the text in question. König distinguishes such philological practice in early Romanticism in Germany from later positivist philological practices in the nineteenth century. He traces the return and repetition of such critical hermeneutics in the work of late twentieth- to twenty-first-century philologists known for work on corpuses ranging from Greek tragedy to Paul Celan’s poetry to Sanskrit classics and their legacy in modern India, namely Peter Szondi, Jean Bollack, and Sheldon Pollock. He thus demonstrates the legacy of Romantic philology for the reading of world literature.

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.

This chapter enacts a practice of “critical commonplacing” to assemble a new global archive of Romanticism, taking as its examples twentieth- and twenty-first-century remediations from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. Commonplacing a new Romantic archive finds a model in the world of collecting, which valorizes marginalia, marks, scratches, cut-and-pastes – capturing flashes of ephemera over static texts and images. From Japanese depictions of Mary Shelley’s creature as bakemono, to Julio Cortázar’s biography on John Keats during the Latin American Boom, to Audre Lorde and Diane Di Prima’s schooldays clique “The Branded,” this chapter expands the archive of Romanticism beyond 1780–1830, across different languages and media. Turning away from the anthology and canon, this approach replaces static texts with the dynamic media of seemingly fleeting forms, often ephemeral and ghostly dispersed. Each example showcases the experimental quality of commonplacing, aligned with progressive youth culture, learning, and play.