The French Romantics: Volume 1

This collaborative, two-volume work offers a full survey of the French Romantics as a whole, and seeks to reassess their collective achievement and continuing value. The movement they created is considered within the broad terms of intellectual and cultural history as well as of literary criticism. Alongside chapters on the poetry, the novel, the drama and literary theory, there are therefore studies of the religious and political thought, historical writings, art, music and opera that are no less central to a full appreciation of French Romanticism. Volume 1 begins with a discussion of the movement's rise, development and aims, and this is followed by two chapters devoted to different aspects of the Romantics' fundamental intellectual commitment as embodied in their ideas on religion, politics and society. The other two chapters in this volume consider the two central literary genres of poetry and prose fiction.