"The introductory essay is superb, the best short introduction to Romanticism I know. It is comprehensive, covering both the wide range of spheres that Romanticism affected—literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, nationalism—and the broad spectrum of European countries in which it was an influential cultural current. It offers a distinctive, unified interpretation of Romanticism that nonetheless does justice to the complexities of Romantic ideas." —Gerald Izenberg, Washington University in St. Louis