A View in the Rear-Mirror

The most recent scholarly debates about Romanticism focus on this period because our modern notions of literature, language, aesthetics, perception, and the sciences were first modeled then. This connection between Romanticism and Modernity/Post-Modernity imparts to Frederick Burwick’s entire scholarly work a supreme significance. Interdisciplinary to an unusual degree, his research has always been orientated towards the boundaries and interfaces of established discourses and the way they interact, respond, diffuse and eventually blend into each other. Looking back on Frederick Burwick’s more than forty years of (still active) academic teaching and research means looking at a range of research still valid in every respect today. The essays presented in this volume address these issues in examining new perspectives on central English and German Romantic poetry and the ‘collaborations’ both of poets and genres, the aesthetics of the Romantic era and its cross-cultural relations, and the discourse of Romantic science and its literary transmutation. The last two essays deal with the Romantic aftermath in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like all the other contributions, they see Romanticism as the foundation of cultural modernity.