The expression Rilindja kombëtare (usually shortened as Rilindja), denoting the Albanian national movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, may be translated as “national rebirth”, “revival of the nation” or “national awakening”. Embracing both a political and a cultural aspect, Rilindja should be understood as the expression of an Albanian political risorgimento as well as an Albanian “renaissance”. The revival of the language and culture of the Albanian nation was not necessarily a stated aim of a political agenda, but political and cultural concerns overlapped in the personal stance of the individual Albanian cultural practitioners and activists. Finally, Rilindja is also regarded as the Romantic period in Albanian literary history.

As a historiographical term, Rilindja emerged mostly after 1945, both in Communist Albania and abroad, following sporadic earlier usage (e.g. the newspaper Rilindja e Arbënis, “The revival of Albania”, founded and directed by Namik Delvina, 1870–1933). Communist Albanian academics (Koço Bihiku, Stefanaq Pollo, Arben Puto, Kristo Frashëri) and diaspora scholars (Ernest Koliqi, Stavro Skendi, Giuseppe Schirò Jr) advanced the idea of the Rilindja as an uncompromising struggle of the Albanian nation against foreign cultural and political oppression. Recent scholarship tends to avoid such overt apologetics and focuses on the novelty that the construction of a national identity represented in a context dominated by more deeply-rooted and widespread allegiances – first and foremost religious ones – among the 19th-century Albanian-speaking population.

The most striking difference between the Rilindja and similar national revival, renaissance or reawakening movements elsewhere in Europe is the time frame. The political starting date is usually taken as 1878, the year of the establishment of the League of Prizren (Lidhja e Prizrenit), the political association created by Albanian patriots to resist the Montenegrin annexation of Ottoman Albanian lands (as decided at the Congress of Berlin in that year). 1912 marks the apogee as the year of the Albanian declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire. This period is markedly late, since most  East European national movements had long before passed the Romantic-Nationalist phase of their nation-building processes.

In the literary realm, the time frame is more in synch with other European developments, albeit in a different local setting. Romanticism first emerged among the Arbëresh (i.e. Italo-Albanian) population of southern Italy, most notably in the unceasing work of Girolamo (Jeronim) De Rada (1814–1903): his 1836 lyrical poem Milosao is the first Romantic piece of literature ever written in Albanian. Other notable Arbëresh Romantic writers were Giuseppe (Zef) Serembe (1843–1891) and Francesco Antonio Santori (1819–1894). Strikingly, Arbëresh authors and activists engaged both in the Albanian national movement and the Italian risorgimento alike, embracing national self-determination as a universal principle and evincing a cultural affinity with both communities.

Rilindja as a cultural trend had a much more troublesome development in the Balkans compared to Italy, a situation mostly due to the opposition from the Ottoman authorities. Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) appreciated Albanians for their loyalty to the Muslim Ottoman state but rigidly curbed any activity that could undermine the cultural monopoly of Islam among them. This hostility only managed to provoke Albanian intellectuals, including many Muslims, who until then had been loyal to the Empire, into a more markedly nationalistic position. Naim Frashëri (1846–1900) penned his nationalistic poems (such as Bagëti e Bujqësi, “Herds and tillage”, 1886) after the imprisonment of his brother Abdyl (1839–1892), one of the promoters of the League of Prizren. Another sign of the widening rift was the forced closure of the Istanbul Society for the Printing of Albanian Language (Shoqëria e të Shtypurit me Shkronja Shqip, 1879-85), an association of Istanbul-based Albanian intellectuals promoting the cultivation of the Albanian language and literature; among its members were a third Frashëri brother, Sami (known as an Ottoman intellectual under his Turkish name Şemseddin Sami, 1850–1904), and the Catholic Pashko Vasa (1825–1892). Vasa’s position as the Ottoman Governor of Lebanon did not prevent him from writing O moj Shqypni (“Oh Albania”, 1880), one of the classic Albanian patriotic poems. Sami Frashëri would still try to find a compromise between his Ottomanist allegiance and his Albanian nationalism in his tract “Albania, what it was, what it is, and what it will be” (1899).

As Romantic literature developed on both sides of the Adriatic, a struggle also unfolded over the creation of a unified Albanian alphabet, until then sorely lacking: the solution eventually came with the adoption of a variation of the Latin alphabet as decided by the 1908 Congress of Manastir/Monastir (present-day Bitola, Republic of Macedonia).

While the political aspect of the Rilindja achieved its fulfilment in the declaration of independence in 1912, several authors would still pen works in the mould of the cultural Rilindja over the following two decades. This was clearly the case with the Catholic cleric, politician and author Gjergj Fishta (1871–1940), whose long career was part of, and outlived, the political Rilindja. Fishta was a pre-eminent activist in the Albanian national movement and would play an equally important role in the political life of interwar Albania. His masterpiece, the epic poem Lahuta e Malcis (“The mountain lute”, 1937), poetically relates the Albanian struggle for emancipation and independence from the League of Prizren until 1912, thus symbolically marking the end of the Rilindja as a cultural trend.