This collaborative, two-volume work offers a full survey of the French Romantics as a whole, and seeks to reassess their collective achievement and continuing value. The movement they created is considered within the broad terms of intellectual and cultural history as well as of literary criticism. Alongside chapters on the poetry, the novel, the drama and literary theory, there are therefore studies of the religious and political thought, historical writings, art, music and opera that are no less central to a full appreciation of French Romanticism. Volume 2 contains chapters on Romantic drama and literary criticism and theory, and there are also contributions on historians, the visual arts, and music and opera. It concludes with an examination of writers active in the movement's later years, formerly described as 'les petits romantiques' but here given deeper significance as 'Romantics on the fringe'. This volume contains a number of highly attractive illustrations.
