Epilogue: A Romantic Return?

One of the aims of this book has been to reassess the stories we have been told about modern history’s disciplinary origins in the late nineteenth century. The emergent processes of differentiation it has uncovered suggest that we must resist the binaries of modern and premodern, subjective and objective, disciplinary and pre-disciplinary, and amateur and professional in our approaches to nineteenth-century historiography. Focusing only or even primarily on the evolution of history as a discipline and profession forecloses the diversity of earlier forms of history, including those anachronistic ‘dead ends’ that can provide a window into the values of the past. A second aim has been to consider the role of feeling in romantic-era historical writing. Ironically, this has often meant focusing on the objectification and even suppression of feeling in nineteenth-century texts. ‘Romantic’ history is not, or at least not always, a history of resurrection, reanimation, or presence, but rather an extended and evolving sense of ‘how and why the past inheres in the present’ and by extension the future. This epilogue suggests that the interpenetration between past, present, and future in romantic-era written history provides one way of understanding why romantic historicism continues to stage various ‘returns’.