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Key research themes
1. How did Romantic-era artists and intellectuals critique and reconstruct traditional conceptions of love, gender roles, and human nature?
This theme interrogates Romanticism’s transformative critique of inherited gender norms, romantic ideals, and human self-understandings. It focuses on how Romantic literature, philosophy, and cultural works employed progressive, evolutionary, and psychoanalytical perspectives to challenge the sacralization of lifelong monogamy, gender complementarity, and patriarchal structures, laying groundwork for modern conceptions of gender equality and relational autonomy. The theme also explores the persistence and evolution of patriarchal narratives in modern society through romanticized social norms. This area is significant because it reveals Romanticism’s role in reshaping the cultural imagination regarding gender and love, with ongoing implications for contemporary feminist and social theories.
Key finding: This study documents how the late-19th-century Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough employed Darwinian naturalistic perspectives to demythologize romantic ideals—particularly lifelong monogamy and gender complementarity—thereby... Read more
Key finding: Using feminist discourse analysis, this paper uncovers how modern patriarchy operates invisibly by romanticizing traditional gender roles as devotion, loyalty, and morality—discourses rooted historically but resurfacing... Read more
Key finding: This essay reveals Mary Wollstonecraft's pivotal role in transforming Enlightenment reason into a Romantic imagination faculty that united intellect, emotion, and moral intuition. Utilizing Platonic and Radical Protestant... Read more
2. How do Romantic and post-Romantic works reflect and construct nature, landscape, and human consciousness in response to socio-political and ecological transformations?
This theme encompasses Romanticism's redefinition of nature and consciousness amid historical upheavals such as the Industrial Revolution, emerging nationalism, and ecological crisis. It includes studies of poetic, literary, philosophical, and visual-cultural productions that staged nature and landscape as sites of sublime experience, mythic meaning, and socio-political critique. The focus lies on the evolution of human self-understanding and symbolic articulation of nature as both idealized reality and contested cultural construct. This research is important for tracing Romanticism’s role in shaping environmental aesthetics and consciousness, as well as contemporary eco-critical discourse.
Key finding: Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study finds that Instagram landscape photography replicates Romantic-era aesthetic strategies—emphasizing solitude, mystification, sublimity, and nostalgia—to create... Read more
Key finding: This dissertation situates Owen Barfield’s evolutionary theory of consciousness within a lineage from Plato through German and British Romantic thought, as a framework to navigate contemporary Anthropocene challenges.... Read more
Key finding: This eco-critical analysis identifies early articulations of eco-anxiety in Byron’s 'Darkness' and Shelley’s 'Ode to the West Wind,' showing Romantic engagement with nature's sublime power and vulnerability amid... Read more
3. How have Romanticism’s historical, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions influenced European national identity and literary memory, especially in the context of geopolitics and cultural transmission?
This theme explores Romanticism's multilayered role in shaping and negotiating European national and transnational identities, literary traditions, and cultural memories during periods of political upheaval and postcolonial transitions. It includes studies of Romantic tropes (e.g., troubadours), literary archetypes, and regional imaginaries as vehicles for interpreting and critiquing nationalist and imperial histories. The theme illuminates Romanticism’s dynamic engagement beyond Eurocentric narratives, emphasizing its migratory and intercultural dimensions that inform contemporary reassessments of Romantic heritage and its political resonances.
Key finding: By analyzing Scott’s late Romantic works, this essay demonstrates how the figure of the troubadour, far from a mere historical artifact, becomes a complex symbol reflecting the unstable geopolitical and cultural landscape of... Read more
Key finding: This special issue introduction frames Romanticism as inherently migratory and transnational, problematizing Eurocentric periodizations and expanding the focus to include cross-cultural exchanges and affective-sensorial... Read more
Key finding: This biblio-historical study reveals how the Swiss Alps became emblematic within Romantic-era cultural imagination, transcending mere geography to symbolize national identity, natural grandeur, and the sublime. The text... Read more
4. How did Romanticism influence developments in music and literary-philosophical aesthetics during the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly through expressive innovations and critiques of Enlightenment rationalism?
This theme investigates Romanticism’s profound influence on music history and philosophical aesthetics, highlighting innovations in musical form, expression, and instrumental technology that paralleled shifts in literary and philosophical conceptions of imagination, emotion, and critique of rationalism. It emphasizes Romanticism’s role in redefining artistic genius, integrating intellectual and affective faculties, and promoting new symbolic and ethical languages within the arts. Recognizing these contributions provides essential context for modern interpretations of cultural and artistic modernity.
Key finding: This comprehensive module elucidates how the 19th-century Romantic era in music expanded melodic, harmonic, orchestral, and formal elements to express individualism, nationalism, idealism, and the sublime. It situates... Read more
Key finding: This analysis highlights Walter Benjamin’s 1919 dissertation as foundational for understanding Romantic philosophy’s reclamation of art and philosophy as hermeneutic tools that address historical flux and uncertainty.... Read more
Key finding: This literary-philosophical essay explores Theodor-Nicolae Carp's 2025 'New Collection of Cosmic Poetry' as a post-secular, axiological cosmopoetic intervention responding to symbolic collapse in late modernity. It identifies... Read more
Key finding: This manuscript positions Carp's 2025 collection 'Mine Poetry from the Satellite of Cosmic Exile Afar' as a seminal text within contemporary Romantic-inflected visionary literature. Employing liturgical diction and archetypes... Read more