Romantic drama

de Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie

In Romantic Drama, three dozen comparatists join forces for a supranational, crosscultural reexamination of the deep paradigm shifts appearing around the start of the nineteenth century which revolutionized drama as a literary art within the enormous civilization constituted by Europe and her overseas extensions. Romantic pronouncements on the canon and poetics of drama, the symptomatic subject-matters treated by Romantic playwrights, the structural means by which they expressed their view of the world, and regional peculiarities are illuminated from multiple perspectives. The volume aspires to skirt the pitfalls of simplistic genetic or teleological thinking. It does not treat Romanticism as a limited "period" dominated by some construed singular master-ethos or dialectic; rather, it follows the literary patterns and dynamics of Romanticism as a flow of interactive currents across geocultural frontiers. Finally, this involves recognizing the Romantic heritage in literary phenomena reaching into our own times. Thus the Romantic celebration of imagination, creation of a theater of the mind, experience of intertextuality, dissolving of generic boundaries, and embrace of "myth" as a challenge to older "history" figure among the important topics, as do Romantic foreshadowings of Symbolist, Existentialist, and Absurdist drama.