Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. the Romantic School in France

Georg Brandes wrote what was, in its time, a revolutionary act of literary criticism: treating literature not as isolated masterpieces but as a living dialogue between writers and their historical moment. This volume, tracing the French Romantic school from 1825 to 1835, dissects a generation of writers who refused to accept the stultifying bourgeois materialism of post-revolutionary France. Brandes positions Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset not as solitary geniuses but as combatants in a cultural war against artistic complacency and political repression. The book illuminates how these writers channeled their defiance into literature that was visceral, individualistic, and unapologetically emotional. Brandes argues that Romanticism was never mere escapism; it was a passionate argument for human freedom in an age that had grown dreary and conformist. This remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not just what the French Romantics wrote, but why their writing mattered then and still resonates now.