Introduction
Introduction

Summary/Abstract: This thematic issue reconsiders Romanticism through a transnational lens. It challenges the tendency to organise literary and artistic production along national lines, and instead argues that Romanticism participates in the formation of imagined communities that exceed the nation-state. In this account, literary and artistic agency emerge as relational, dynamic, and more-than-national. Accordingly, Romantic literary and artistic production is organised in terms not of national boundaries, but of the circulation of texts, images, ideas, and people across linguistic, political, and cultural borders. The issue envisions “the border” less as a dividing line than as a series of porous nodes that reveal the mobility and hybridity at the heart of Romantic culture. Drawing on recent scholarship on global, imperial, and comparative Romanticisms, the volume reframes Romantic creative practices within fluid networks shaped by translation, travel, exile, correspondence, print culture, and visual exchange. It shows how Romantic identities – be they authorial, artistic, or political – were negotiated within these transnational spaces, and how such negotiations unsettled forming models of national belonging. The volume also highlights the importance of revolution, imperial expansion, and broader geopolitical change in shaping Romantic conceptions of art and authorship. Across literary and visual studies, it emphasises how Romantic works both represent and perform processes of border-crossing that resist cultural insularity. Rather than considering transnationalism as simply one feature of Romanticism, the issue shows how it sheds new light on both canonical and lesser-known literary and visual works.

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