It was not until around 1800 that the generation became a properly historical category. For it was during this period that the shared experience of contemporaries—the experience, for example, of being young at the dawn of the French Revolution—emerged as a way of understanding and articulating a new sense of collective identity. As Goethe noted in his Poetry and Truth of 1811, "anybody born only a decade earlier or later might well have become a completely different person.” "Romantic” is a retrospective label, one first applied by later generations to their predecessors. "Generation,” by contrast, was a category invented by the Romantics themselves.

The Romantic Studies Association of Australasia will host papers and panels on the theme of "Romantic Generations.” The 2021 conference provides an opportunity to revisit the generations of the Romantics, and to ask what they generated. It is also an opportunity to consider the present and future of Romanticism as a critical field of historicist study. What can Romanticism generate today? What will future generations make of it?