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Romanticism emerged in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century in the context of the changing social and emotional landscape and political crisis that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. The latter was initially seen as the apotheosis of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, but as its promise gave way to the Reign of Terror and the massive upheavals produced by the Napoleonic wars, man's reason alone no longer seemed adequate as a guide for understanding the world. This failure of the progressive march of rationality and intellect ushered in a “time of immense uncertainty and unforeseeable possibility” (p. 3), out of which emerged a new sensibility “founded in a respect for the elusiveness of meanings and for ‘the hermeneutic principle according to which mystery and incomprehensibility foster understanding’ [Calhoun ]”1 (p. 4).
Romanticism privileged the Dionysian over the Apollonian; valorized the ineffable and the inevitable chaos of experience over finitude, organization, and mankind's attempted imposition of rational order; and encouraged the cultivation and tolerance of an attitude of receptive incomprehension in the face of the inevitable mysteries of existence. It was “not so much a movement … as a state of mind, a form of engagement” (p. 9), a “radically open-minded” (p. 1) engagement with one's world