In this work 36 comparatists join forces for a supranational, cross-cultural re-examination of the deep paradigm shifts appearing around the start of the 19th century which revolutionized drama as a literary art within the enormous civilization constituted by Europe and her overseas extensions. Romantic pronouncements on the canon and poetics of drama, the symptomatic subject-matters treated by Romantic playwrights, the structural means by which they expressed their view of the world, and regional peculiarities are illuminated from multiple perspectives. The volume aspires to avoid the pitfalls of simplistic genetic or teleological thinking. It does not treat Romanticism as a limited "period" dominated by some construed singular master-ethos or dialectic but instead follows the literary patterns and dynamics of Romanticism as a flow of interactive currents across geocultural frontiers. Finally, this involves recognizing the Romantic heritage in literary phenomena reaching into our own times.
Thus the Romantic celebration of imagination, creation of a theatre of the mind, experience of intertextuality, dissolving of generic boundaries, and embrace of "myth" as a challenge to older "history" figure among the important topics, as do Romantic foreshadowings of Symbolist, Existentialist and Absurdist drama.