Abstract

This essay deals with an idea of Romanticism that the Italian critic and essayist Mario Praz formulated in the introduction to his The Romantic Agony. By means of a felicitously labelled “approximationµ later ‘systematised’ in his Storia della letteratura inglese, Praz conceived of Romanticism as an allencompassing literary phenomenon, spanning from Ossian’s verses to E. M. Forster’s novels, and not just as a brief phase that eventually died out after the untimely deaths of the second-generation Romantics. I contend that Praz’s contribution, although often overshadowed by the sheer mass of his body of work, should be reappraised in the broader context of the mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American debate on the discrimination of Romanticisms. To this end, this essay also includes a bibliographic list of Praz’s most notable Romantic-themed contributions as a useful premise for future explorations.