Romanticism and Opera

Demonstrating the widescale influence of opera upon the cultural field of the Romantic period, the essays collected in "Opera and Romanticism" aim to redress the critical neglect to which this form has been previously subjected. A lush interchange between opera and both literature and drama is examined in the essays of Christina Fuhrmann, Diane Hoeveler, and Anne Williams. Further, in the essays of J. Jennifer Jones and Jessica Quillin, we see that Romantic opera did not leave behind its Italian roots, but rather remained complexly connected to its predecessor in ways that can be seen in some of the most canonical writers of the time. By reclaiming the suppressed history of opera in this period, Gillen D'Arcy Wood's volume illustrates that opera is what he calls "a vital flashpoint of aesthetic and political interests in the long Romantic age."