Counter to received wisdom, it is in the Romantic period, not the 20th century, that war assumes its modern form as “total war.” We will examine how literary, philosophical, and artistic Romanticisms grapple with this new phenomenon. Subtopics include: war, media, technology; landscape, spectatorship, and the sublime; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the concept of Europe. Readings from Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Fichte, Clausewitz, Kleist, Stendhal, Austen, de Quincey, and Hazlitt, along with recent scholarship on this topic (Bell, Favret, Mieszkowski), and relevant critical theory (Freud, Butler).
