Realpoetik compares the writings of key German, French, and Italian Romantics, with an eye to their differences from British Romanticism. The principle of selection is to choose writers whose use of fiction is realistic--not realist, but fundamentally contributory to the purposes of non-fictional discourse. The political resonance audible when we put Real at the start of a compound noun is also true to the period looked at. At that time, positive political institutions were recovering from their upending in the French Revolution and their strategic re-shaping in the period of Restoration...