"Exploring the Romantic period's experiments in individual and national self-consciousness, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes striking connections and contrasts to reveal identities being re-orientated and disorientated in response to historical change from the French Revolution onwards"--

Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. He has been Visiting Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Visiting Professor at La Sapienza University of Rome. His book Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (2003) won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli book prize. His most recent books are, as editor, The Oxford handbook of European Romanticism (2016) and, as author, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (2013).

Part I. Disorientating Kant: 1. Introduction: sublimity and abjection; 2. Kleist and the Kant-crisis; 3. Hölderlin and the philosophers; Part II. The Uses of Abjection: 4. The feminist humanism of Felicia Hemans: the poetics of Records of Woman (1828); 5. Thomas Moore and the national lyric; 6. Ugo Foscolo's literary hypocrisy; Part III. Optimism and Pessimism: 7. Balzac's comic pessimism; 8. George Sand's optimism; Part IV. Romancing the Modern: 9. Retrospect: Rilke translates Leopardi.