Despite a century of sustained critical activity and an interest level in the last ten years never before reached (as reflected in the sheer number of scholarly works produced), the study of Romanticism remains focused for the most part through individual, national, and linguistic views, and is now largely embedded in the complications of contemporary theory as applied through those limiting views. Partly responsible is the fact that Romanticism itself forms a set of rhetorical, cultural, and ideological lenses refracting a multiplicity and even chaos that at times seems to defy comparative...