"Europe"

As ideas of cultural identity in Britain solidified between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romantic-period narratives of the nation’s literary heritage confronted and accommodated a long history of contacts and exchanges with neighbouring traditions. This chapter addresses this process of cultural self-construction by exploring how Romantic nonfiction prose engaged with Europe as a literary–cultural continuum and assessed the place of England and Britain within it. Exploring selected literary works—including Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–1781), John Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1814), Walter Scott’s essays on chivalry, drama, and romance for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1818–1824), William Hazlitt’s lectures and critical essays (1817–1820), and Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected’ (1823)—this chapter reappraises how nonfiction prose contributed to the emergence of a Romantic discourse on the nation’s literary–cultural history and identity, its current condition, and possible developments within the encompassing context of Europe.