Kant’s famous comparison of his transcendental critique to a revolution serves as the departure point for Nicolas Halmi’s chapter, which also explores the powerful conjunction between philosophy, criticism, and poetry in early German and British Romanticism, marked by acute self-consciousness. Halmi first discusses changes in the concept of revolution, and how the new meaning lent itself to politics and to philosophy, which both sought to give the subject greater autonomy and self-governance. He then examines different theories developed in response to Kant but also to the Revolution and its perceived failure, many of which call for a moral and intellectual revolution of the self as a preparation for democratic reform. These include Fichte’s theory of scientific knowledge, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Friedrich Schlegel’s transcendental poetry, and Shelley’s defence of the poetic imagination as a source of moral sympathy. Key ideas presented in the chapter include Bildung, the Absolute, Wechselerweis, romantic irony, and allegory. Halmi concludes with a section on Wordsworth’s poetic reform in the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that it emerged as a conservative reaction to revolution.

Chapter Eight revisits several of the same authors and texts as in the previous chapter, but focusses on the complex relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, looking at how the modern concept of citizenship emerged in this period as a bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic values. The first par discusses the origins and theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism, including the notions of Humanität, republicanism, and national culture in works by Kant, Schlegel, and Herder. It then turns to two texts on education written in response to the Revolution by Schiller and Fichte. The latter combines Romantic nationalism with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in an effort to first liberate the individual nation, then, through moral education, humanity as a whole. In the last part, the author presents three case studies of lived Romantic cosmopolitanism, in which the above ideals are enacted. These include an abolitionist slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano; the Franco-British poet and writer Helen Maria Williams’s radical repo+L22rting from Revolutionary Paris; and German poet and patriot Karl Follen’s early nationalist and later internationalist writing in exile.

The third chapter forcuses on the influential translation project of the Platonic dialogues by Friedrich Schleiermacher and its relation to his own hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s work and thinking on Plato is not only representative and innovative of Plato scholarship of the time but harnesses assumptions about individuality, development, and understanding to a Platonic model. This model is in evidence in Schleiermacher’s own thinking about education and scholarship and also importantly influenced such figureheads as August Boeckh, professor of classical philology in Berlin for over fifty years, and directions taken in classical scholarship.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.