Counter to received wisdom, it is in the Romantic period, not the 20th century, that war assumes its modern form as “total war.” In this seminar, we will thus examine how literary, philosophical, and artistic Romanticisms grapple with this new phenomenon. Subtopics include: war, media, and technology; landscape, spectatorship, and the sublime; the eventful and the ordinary; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the concept of Europe. Readings from Kant, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Barbauld, de Quincey, Clausewitz, Kleist, Stendhal, and Austen, along with recent scholarship on this topic (David Bell, Favret, Mieszkowski, Engberg-Pedersen, David Clark, Gurton-Wachter).