If, as Sigmund Freud argues, to be in culture is the same as to feel a kind of unease, a kind of discontent, then what is the specific, historically differentiated place of Romanticism in the cultural history of unease? What are the forms that discontent takes in an age of increasing, indeed unprecedented pressure on the individual, an age that, at the same time, offers a new space in which such discontent can be voiced and visions of a non-repressive existence can be sketched – in the realm of the aesthetic? Blending theory with close textual analysis, this volume offers a series of case studies that, while identifying a concrete historical moment, also point to some deep continuities between Romanticism and the society we live in today.