Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition (Super alta perennis, 20). Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017.

There is a dark side of Romanticism, considered in Rolf Lessenich’s monograph Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition (2017). This brilliant com parative study discusses authors from the late eighteenth up to the end of the nineteenth century who are variously labelled as Romantic Disillusionists, Romantic Sceptics or Negative Romantics, inspired by the Greek sceptic philosopher Pyrrho. The most influential source of the disillusionist undercurrent in European Romanticism is Lord Byron, whose poetry and prose runs as a guiding thread through the entire study, and in the light of which Lessenich analyses key passages and draws fascinating parallels between the literature of authors such as Franz Grillparzer, John Clare, Heinrich Heine, Giacomo Leopardi, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred de Musset, Georg Büchner, Mikhail Lermontov, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (to mention but a few). All of them share the tendency to break with the ideas and beliefs of the Positive Romantics’ trust in the idealist philosophy of Plato and Christianity; “Romantic Disillusionism had a common core […]: the non-dogmatic doubt or dogmatic negation of Paradise Regained”.