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 analysis.
In an attempt to refocus on Romanticism without trying to invent a new synthesis for the movement, the editors have selected thirteen essays from a variety of older and newer scholarly voices that represent a rethinking of key Romantic texts and interrelations through the lens of three fundamental theoretical issues: power, gender, and subjectivity. They call for a newly comparative sense of Romanticism that avoids the kind of critical explication of these issues limited to single national, linguistic, or cultural traditions, or seen through too narrowly applied contemporary theoretical `-isms'.