European Romantic Prose: a Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 15 (2013) Issue 7 Article 20 European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Arno Gimber Complutense University Madrid Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Gimber, Arno. "European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.7 (2013): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2394> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 1070 times as of 11/ 07/19. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu > CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb > Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture , the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected] > Volume 15 Issue 7 (December 2013) Book Review Article 20 Arno Gimber, "European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages " <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss7/20> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.7 (2013) Special Issue New Work in Comparative Literature in Europe . Ed. Marina Grishakova, Lucia Boldrini, and Matthew Reynolds <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss7/ > Arno Gimber, "European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages " page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.7 (2013): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss7/20> Special Issue New Work in Comparative Literature in Europe . Ed. M. Grishakova, L. Boldrini, and M. Reynolds Arno GIMBER European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages The International Comparative Literature Association / Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée launched the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages / Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes (CHLEL/HCLLE) in 1967, an ambitious and unprecedented project that over the years has earned respect and recognition among scholars world wide (for volumes published see the Works Cited). The five volumes on Romanticism, like other groups of volumes in the series, contribute a dense and extensive web of connections and parallels, unusually multidimensional. Editors Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle avoid defining Romanticism itself and treat it, instead, as a phenomenon whose meaning continues to resonate in a transnational perspective, crossing "linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries" ("Introduction" xx). They show how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and the New World, revealing also the ways in which the contribution of the Romantic period lead to a redefinition of Modernism. Volumes on the Romantic period in CHLEL/HCLLE began in 1988 with Romantic Irony , edited by Frederick Garber. Romantic Prose Fiction , edited by Gillespie, Engel, and Dieterle, is the last part of the sub- series, which involves a total of five volumes: Romantic Irony (Garber), Romantic Drama (Gillespie), Romantic Poetry (Esterhammer), Non-fictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders (Sondrup and Nemoianu), and Romantic Prose Fiction . In the review at hand I focus on Romantic Prose Fiction in particular, a volume that addresses basic Romantic themes and story types — the romance, novel, novella, short story, etc. — and considers the Romantic impact not just in Europe, but across the Atlantic and in the light of its influence on later generations. While it is possible to write a history of literature in national categories without a single non-German reference — as Rüdiger Safranski did in 2007 in Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre — the Romantic period marks a wide network of connections and supranational influences which extend towards the beginning of European modernity and that have been neglected for too long. Without this premise, the Romantic era cannot be understood within the context of single national literatures. Contributors to Romantic Prose Fiction discuss the impact of Romanticism not just in literary history and theory, but also across disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies, the other arts, the social sciences, etc. Since the twentieth century, one of the most important issues in Western literary scholarship has been the question of the heterogeneity of the Romantic movement that occurred more or less at the same time in various ways across Europe and not just in specific national literatures. In "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary history" René Wellek approached this issue and concluded that Romanticism could be contemplated as an artistic period, since it appeared with identical or at least similar characteristics throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. Romanticism is commonly seen as the beginning of modernity, and it is, of course, obvious its importance in Great Britain, France, and Germany with regards to the avant-garde position of these cultures in Western Art. In this sense, Romantic Prose Fiction does not go beyond Wellek's approach and remains within Eurocentrism. It does, however, focus on Romanticism in a comprehensive manner including new readings from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives all of which add value. The view beyond national borders is the other strong point of the CHLEL/HCLLE Romanticism volumes, although it might also imply some dangers. For example, if we accept that Romantic literature might stretch from 1760 to 1890 — i.e., from the publication in 1760 of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, to Herman Melville's Billy Budd Sailor , almost a 130 years later — and thus the time-span is so wide that is no longer operative. One could ask, for instance, why not include Luis Cernuda among the Romantic poets or why not set the beginning of the Romantic period in Spain with the figure of Cernuda, as Philip Silver suggested recently, arguing that anti-mimetic writing Arno Gimber, "European Romantic Prose: A Book Review Article of Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages " page 3 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.7 (2013): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss7/20> Special Issue New Work in Comparative Literature in Europe . Ed. M. Grishakova, L. Boldrini, and M.