A number of discursive genres emerged (besides the literary ones, Romantic history-writing, and journalism) with a strong national mobilization potential in the Romantic period.

The nation’s mirror: Literature and literary criticism, literary history

Foremost among these is that of cultural criticism and literary history. Heralded by the writings of Herder (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-91) and Madame de Staël (De la littérature, 1800), intellectuals began to reflect on the national diversity and historical development of culture and of cultural production. This tradition of critical reflection was fed by aesthetic-philosophical writings and by antiquarianism, and in turn overlapped with knowledge production in fields like philosophy or linguistics, but also generated a specific form of critical writing around the field of literary history. After an encyclopedic tradition of world-historical literary surveys (from Benito Feijoo, 1676–1764, and Juan Andrés, 1740–1817, to Friedrich Bouterwek, 1766–1828), the Schlegel brothers in their various lecture series developed a model of national literary history whose characteristics were influential throughout Europe (A.W. Schlegel, Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, 1809-11; Friedrich Schlegel, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, 1815). Some of these can be summarized as follows:

• literature is an intellectually and artistically heightened form of cultural memory, initially formulated orally and often anonymously, later laid down in writing and credited to known authors. Literature is thus rooted in, and expressive of, the nation’s sensibilities, moral outlook, experiences, and character, while at the same time evolving in an ongoing process of artistic and intellectual refinement and aesthetic autonomization.
• the stages of this development move, broadly, from oral-formulaic and epic beginnings by way of chivalric romance to the social genre of the drama, the psychological genre of the novel, and the lyrical-emotional genre of poetry. These stages determine the historical development of every national literature individually, but moments of historical decline or strength may affect the quality of literary output at a given moment.

The link thus articulated between national character, historical conditions, and stage of social-evolutionary development was initially, by the Schlegels themselves, applied as a diversifying lens to European literature as a whole. Adopted even by the later positivists like Hippolyte Taine, this European stadialism tended to tone down the traditional distinction between “ancient” and “modern” (the literatures of biblical and classical antiquity vs that of post-medieval times); while this distinction continued in the field of “classical” vs “modern” philology, it lost ground to an alternative distinction pioneered by Madame de Staël: between a classically-rooted South of Europe (as in Sismondi’s  Littérature du midi de l’Europe, 1813) on the one hand, and a tribally and medievally-rooted North. The opposition was compounded with that between Homer and Ossian (poets of the sunny Mediterranean and the clouded North, respectively), between the Beautiful and the Sublime, and, hence, between the aesthetics of classicism and those of Romanticism.

The nation’s cycles: Literary history and folklore

At the same time, this raised the question of how literatures emerged from an oral-collective, ethnographic root system into a written-canonical aesthetic stage. That conundrum dated back as far as the early-18th-century preoccupation with “Original Geniuses” (like Homer and Shakespeare), their untaught mastery and benchmarking power, and their unexplained, sudden appearance in history. Following the éclat of Ossian, who was proved to have been not an Original Genius of the North, but the manufacture of the oral-ballad-collector James Macpherson, the philologist F.A. Wolf raised, famously, the Homeric Question in 1795: if Ossian had not been a Homer of the North, possibly Homer himself had been a Macpherson of the South? This point of view (Homer as the unifying redactor of oral-heroic ballads) suggested a possible articulation between the mode of the oral-collective and the canonically literate: oral-heroic, “rhapsodic” fragments could be seen as the pre-classic building blocks which could coalesce into national-epic foundational classics. This notion of “oral epic” would inform the work of Vuk Karadžić, Elias Lönnrot, and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald; it also inspired Claude Fauriel’s application of his research on Balkan (Greek, Serbian) oral epic to the emergence of a post-Latin Romance literature with the Troubadours. It was echoed in the thought of the Heidelberg Romantics (Görres, the Grimms) that surviving oral folklore or popular literature could be the debris of ancient epics and myths, whose integrity, coherence, and literary status had been lost as a result of historical attrition, but the debased fragments of which were kept by the lower strata of society, unaffected by the transnational forces of cosmopolitanism.

This cyclical system, with “high” literature both rooted in, and reverting back into, the folk life of the vernacular collectivity, in turn placed a positive value on the demotic and the authentic. While “high culture”, certainly in modern times, was seen as an increasingly transnational-cosmopolitan hypercanon dominated by the hegemony of the Italian Renaissance and French classicism, critics valorized the truly “national” traditions unaffected by the international fashions of the time. This choice gave a new cultural value to folk art and folk literature, and a privileged position to those literary traditions where the advent of print and the Renaissance had not caused a deep rupture with the Middle Ages: Spain, Germany, and the Scandinavian kingdoms.

Not only did this cultural valorization of national authenticity inform the work of literary historians (Spanish romanceros and drama were popular with the Grimms and the Schlegels, possibly also out of sympathy with Spain’s stalwart anti-Napoleonic resistance), it also fed into a more generalized type of cultural criticism and cultural history, predicated on the determining power of national characters, and on the imperative for states and societies to remain true to this purported character.

The nation’s character: Ethnotype and self-image

National characterology had been a point of interest for Enlightenment philosophers and encyclopedists. Based on neo-Aristotelian poetics and on anecdotal stereotypes, they were subjected to increasing systematization, culminating in works like the Ontwerp tot eene algemeene characterkunde (“Design for a general characterology”, 3 vols, 1788-97) by the Dutch clergyman and Patriot statesman Willem Ockerse. In the meantime, such ethnotypes had found general currency in cultural philosophy. The idea that the Germanic North of Europe was temperamentally opposed to the Latin South (the former moral-cerebral, individualistic, and ponderously profound; the latter sensual-emotional, collective, and superficially elegant) can be traced from Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748) to Madame de Staël, who also used it as the moral organizing principle of her De l’Allemagne (1810-13). For all those opposing Napoleon in Holland, England, and above all Germany, this ethnotypical template provided an obvious logic and rhetoric: the freedom-loving, honest, authentic home nation was vindicated against the collectivist, presumptuous, cosmopolitan, and alienating foreign empire. The ethnotypes themselves were instrumentalized in all forms of cultural production and in political activism, from Arndt’s Geist der Zeit tracts (1806-09) to Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808) to Jahn’s Deutsches Volkstum. The ethnotemperamental view of cultural history informed a new type of moral-cultural ethnography pioneered by, again, Arndt (Ansichten und Aussichten der teutschen Geschichte, 1814; Versuch in vergleichender Völkergeschichte, 1843), also noticeable in Ranke’s Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824). The underlying notion in each case is that European history is determined by the territorial and political confrontation of temperamentally and characterologically different “nations”.

The nation’s here (and there) and now: Panoramatic writing

Applied to the present, the interest in the authenticity and characterology of Europe’s various cultural communities and aspirational “nation-states” triggered a new mass medium. In the wake of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on visual panoramas, dioramas, and other modes of offering a concentrated, modular display of the world’s diversity, this genre has come to be called “panoramatic”: surveys, usually combining text and images, encyclopedic in scope but anecdotal-picturesque in focus, of the diverse distinctive qualities of the nation. Rooted in the twin traditions of travel writing and the visual culture around geography and archeology (prints and drawings of landmarks, traditions, dress, customs, and habits), it found expression in publications surveying the country’s landscapes (with features such as ruins and other landmarks) and offering Theophrastic or quasi-ethnographical character sketches of national, social, or regional individuals of communities. Examples ranges from the Irish Penny Journal to the French Voyages pittoresques and Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (which influenced Portuguese and Spanish spin-offs and Spanish costumbrismo) to the Austro-Hungarian Kronprinzenwerk. Often heavily illustrated, these publications profited from new developments in book production and dissemination such as lithographs and steel engravings, and publication by subscription. In turn, this panoramatic interest in the picturesque and distinctive characteristics of the nation fed into the thematic choices of plein-air painting and of the emerging rustic-regional novel.

The nation’s future: Manifestos

The historicism that was so central to Romantic Nationalism meant that the cult of authenticity not only posed a moral imperative to the present generations (along the lines of “to thine own self be true”, resisting foreign influences and maintaining the traditions, languages, and customs inherited from the ancestors), but also a programmatic line of action for the future. For the 19th century also witnessed the birth of that discursive genre known as  the manifesto. It had been pioneered in the great political declarations of 1776 (US independence) and 1789 (Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen), and found a rapid application in literary aesthetics: in the 1790s, the advent of Romanticism was heralded by the likes of the Schlegels, Novalis, and Wordsworth in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. Generational shifts in literary taste would henceforth be proclaimed, as a matter of course, by manifesto-like statements; these in turn contributed to the notion that the march of literature was a steady process of dialectical innovation and a refusal to acquiesce in inherited values.

The political and the aesthetic revolutionary manifestos co-existed and often merged. Moral-political manifestos, calls for a proper cultivation of the national literature, and statements of principle outlining how the essential character of the nation is to be safeguarded and manifested in the future suffuse the prefaces of 19th-century scholarly and literary works, as well as the journalism of political activists and the cultural avant-garde. In many cases they testify not only to a desire for social emancipation or political independence, but also to the instrumentalization of an underlying ethnotype (the self-image of the nation’s authentic temperament and distinctive character) as the moral basis and justification for such a political agenda.