Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature,
both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays
maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts
were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of
acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects,
the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection
and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and
anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which
make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic
view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century.
Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics
by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of
objects works in the literature of the time.