SOURCE: Cantor, Paul A. “Stoning the Romance: The Ideological Critique of Nineteenth-Century Literature.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (summer 1989): 705-20.

In the following essay, Cantor summarizes current critiques of Romanticism and the aesthetic theories associated with it, maintaining that such attacks are misguided and biased.

And the poets lie too much. 

—Zarathustra

I regret that limitations of space prevent me from discussing the essays on which I have been asked to comment in any detail, thus forcing me to deal with them at a level of generality which cannot do justice to the wealth of specific observations they contain. I will be forced to concentrate on what I see as the distinctive trend behind these essays, and even here I will be reduced to oversimplifying the positions they richly and diversely articulate. I am sure that the authors do not think of themselves as forming a single school or...