ABSTRACT
Quintessentially transnational and transdisciplinary in its origins, Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin notes, is a recent movement to transform Western consciousness most radically, a transformation that, we would like to show, has continued to reverberate not merely in the West but in the East after the heyday of the movement, roughly from the 1800s to 1850s, from Frühromantik to the American Renaissance. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many figures carried the torch of Romanticism and helped to keep the fire burning to date. Three figures, we suggest, stand out and have exerted the greatest influence, respectively, in sustaining the social, aesthetic, and philosophical forces of Romanticism: John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
