'A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.'--The Sunday Times ' Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.'--National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle H lo se, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a