Chapter 18 - Mentalities in Transition: Irish Romanticism in European Context

Summary

Comparing cultural developments in Ireland with European romanticism is problematic on a number of scores. The European periodisation of romanticism is broader than the English-derived start- and end-dates applied to Ireland; European surveys, in aggregating many exemplars from many different countries, create an unjustified impression of quantitative preponderance, against which background any small individual country would appear comparatively scant; and a proper European comparison should juxtapose Ireland with similar countries (imperial peripheries like Bohemia, Croatia, or Finland), rather than with imperial-metropolitan heartlands such as neighbouring France or England. This chapter attempts to correct these imbalances. Most importantly, it is argued that romanticism manifested itself, not only in the field of poetic production (to which its meaning is reduced nowadays), but also in the fields of cultural reflection and knowledge production; and it is in these fields that Irish developments are most closely analogous to European ones.