Includes bibliographical references and index.

The book focuses on four central themes: imagination, community, irony, and authenticity, exploring the promise and the difficulties of these Romantic ideas. Rather than taking a historical approach chronicling how Romanticism has influenced current thought, The Romantic Legacy is a philosophical effort to discover new meanings; to find what we can still learn from it today. Most important, Larmore demonstrates how certain conventional beliefs and misconceptions that have built up around Romanticism have kept us from grasping its most important insights. Speaking of the ideal of imagination, for instance, Larmore dispels the notion that Romanticism involved an escape from the world or the substitution of art for reality. He clarifies the Romantic concept of community, salvaging its real insights from its ruinous usage by fascist and nationalist groups over the years. Finding more to irony than a frivolous lack of commitment and uncovering a greater meaning in authenticity than contrived efforts to flout social convention, The Romantic Legacy points out how these two central themes have shaped our modern sense of individuality. With its heterodox picture of Romantic art and thought, The Romantic Legacy provides a more complex and ultimately more hopeful analysis than those found in the influential works of M. H. Abrams, Paul De Man, and Richard Rorty. Larmore believes that we can look beyond some of the outlandish and dangerous ideas that Romanticism admittedly unleashed and recapture instead what is of enduring value for our lives today.