Secularism, Cosmopolitanism, and Romanticism

This volume begins to unpack the relationships among the three terms of its title. Despite its air of neutrality, "secularism" is increasingly understood to have its own interests, particularly when it comes to defining and managing the "religious." And, thanks to its constitutive relationship to modernity, romanticism is invested in secularism, not least in those moments typically coded as "spiritual" or "religious." Cosmopolitanism, too, bears a vexed relationship to a period typically associated with nationalism. Finally, secularism and cosmopolitanism are themselves related in surprising ways, both historically and conceptually. Do they pursue the same project? Do they diverge? How and when? And how does romantic writing figure such alignments?