The era of Romanticism brought forth a truly overwhelming wealth in the realms of music, art, and literature. Composers from Beethoven by way of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Liszt to Wagner compete for our attention in the concert hall. The art of Goya, Friedrich, Constable, Delacroix, and a host of others dazzles our eyes in the museums. The poetry of Wordsworth, the dramas of Kleist, the novels of Hugo enchant our imaginations. Rarely, if ever, has the world of aesthetics witnessed a similar outpouring of genius—not to mention the accompanying achievements in philosophy, history, medicine, law, and other fields of intellect.

Faced with this spectacular array, scholars have employed their ingenuity in the effort to reduce it to assessable proportions. As far as literature is concerned, almost a century ago Arthur O. Lovejoy argued in an influential article that “the ‘Romanticism’ of one country may have little in common with that of another” and that we are in fact dealing with “a plurality of Romanticisms.” That widespread view has generated a multitude of national histories of Romanticism—from Pierre Lasserre's Le romantisme français (1907) to Philippe van Tieghem's Le romantisme français (1951), from Ricarda Huch's Die Romantik (1899–1902) to Rüdiger Safranski's Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre (2007)—as well as such critical anthologies as The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, edited by James Chandler (2009). These national studies of Romanticism in French, German, and English are paralleled in many other European literatures.

Some scholars have sought to counteract the inexorable temporal momentum that dominates histories of literature, drawing us ever forward and oft en preventing the relaxed immersion in a particular moment. German literary histories routinely divide the “Goethezeit” (roughly 1770 to 1830) into “Sturm und Drang,” “Klassik,” and “Romantik.” Virgil Nemoianu, in The Taming of Romanticism, focused on a particular phase of Romanticism: its late shift into a post-Napoleonic Biedermeier culture (1815–48). I myself have used what I call a “chronotopological” method to characterize Romanticism as it manifested itself at specific times in specific German cities. In a more general study I sought to approach German Romanticism through the literary manifestation of such central institutions of the times as mines, the law, the madhouse, the university, and the museum.