Book Review: ‘Romanticism: a very short introduction’ by Michael Ferber

This is an excellent introduction to Romanticism, the late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (mostly) European movement that is seen as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and reductionism, classicism, the Industrial Revolution, and eighteenth-century political revolutions.

Michael Ferber explores what it was that united the difficult-to-define ‘Romantics’; the closely associated concepts of ‘Sensibility’ and ‘the Sublime’; the Romantic consecration of the ‘poet’—a concept that, for them, extended beyond someone who simply wrote poetry; and Romantic attitudes towards religion, philosophy, science and society.

As one who has struggled to get his head around precisely what on earth made the Romantics tick, I found this book an extremely helpful summary.