Submission deadline: 30 November 2025
Peer-review (est.): February 2026
Publication Date: 30 May 2026

Studies on Romanticism have long since revealed the intrinsically plural nature of the movement (Lovejoy 1924). However, there is still an indefinable, though undeniable, 'family air' spread among its various local manifestations (Wellek 1963). This suspension between identity and difference has allowed the explicit adoption of transnational and transdisciplinary approaches (Chao/Corrigan 2019), and Romanticism itself, by virtue of its migratory vocation (Gottlieb 2014a, 2014b), is providing valuable insights for the development of Global Literary Studies (Roig-Sanz/Rotger 2022: 4). Nevertheless, the attempts for a morphology of global Romanticism have made little progress beyond the iconic formulation with which René Wellek tried to describe «its essence and nature»: «that attempt, doomed to failure and abandoned by our time, to identify subject and object, to reconcile man and nature, consciousness and unconsciousness by poetry» (Wellek 1963: 221).

Both the collective plurality and the aspiration to a totalising union are found, in fact, already starting from the aesthetic ideal of symphilosophy (Symphilosophie) and sympoetry (Sympoesie) with which Friedrich Schlegel described the shared authorship characteristic of Jenese Romanticism (Marola 2024) and having in the permanent think-tanks of magazines such as the Athenaeum its privileged place of expression (Rossi 2023: 142-160). Transcending the mere socio-aesthetic component, the semantic aspect of the Grecian prefix syn- opens at the same time the synthetic and syncretic dimension of the movement, the one which, while aspiring to universalism, always remained aware of its irresolvable character, indefinitely progressive (progressive Universalpoesie). Syn- therefore seems to operate as an attractive force, able at most to retain, maintaining in tension, the most disparate dialectical poles: nationalism (Leerssen 2013) and globalism, specialisation and inter/transdisciplinarity (Faflak/Wright 2016: 325-390), theory of genres and hybridisation of genres (Duff 2009; Michler 2015: 348-466), poetics of genius and the society of letters (Henrich 1991; Mulsow/Stamm 2005), individual and community, subject and natural environment (Bate 1991; Hall 2016; Rigby 2023). Like the method adopted by Dorit Messlin for the study of Frühromantik (Messlin 2011: 24), although determined diachronic and geographically, the magnetic field of Sympoetry could also delineate a synchronous structural complex, whose dialectical vitality would lend itself to the crossing of national and continental borders, adapting plastically to the instances of heterogeneous ethnic and cultural identities. If already Helmut Hühn and Joachim Schiedermaier had complained about the lack of attention to the potential inherent in the ubiquitous prefix syn- and how it could inspire not only an interdisciplinary trajectory but also a reflection on a pan-European Romantic paradigm (Hühn/Schiedermaier 2015: 5), we believe that the Sympoetry, outlined as a morphological criterion, can lend itself to an even more versatile interoperability, connecting, while distinguishing, the individual phenotypic manifestations of movement on a planetary scale, from European Romanticism (1790-1830) to those that emerged in other global areas as a result of their extra-European migration (1830-1920). 

• Sympoetry as global poetry (European/extra-European, Global Romanticism, Orientalism)
• Sympoetry as total poetry (specialisation and hybridisation of the fields of knowledge, encyclopaedia, art and science)
• Sympoetry as hybrid poetry (differentiation and mixing of literary genres, fragmentation, romantic irony)
• Sympoetry as poet-ensemble (author constellations, circulation networks, cultural transfer, translations) Sympoetry as community poetising (negotiation of national identities, folklore)
• Sympoetry as symbiosis (Green Romantics, man-environment relationship, Naturphilosophie)