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This chapter offers a description of Romanticism and the Romantic movement and delineates the primary arguments of the book. It interrogates the question ‘what is Romantic?’ by investigating historical Romanticism and its relationship to imagination, the problem of identity and selfhood, and Romantic irony, linking these principles to the twenty-first century theory of metamodernism. It then connects these concepts to the films discussed, drawing on historically relevant film movements and previous scholarship on American independent film. It concludes with overviews of subsequent chapters.

This chapter argues that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York creates a metatextual relationship between director and protagonist through its use of Romantic irony. The film directly addresses issues of solipsism as it is told from the radically subjective viewpoint of its self-obsessed protagonist, who may or may not be descending into madness. Kaufman conjures sublime feeling in the spectator through aesthetic devices of fantastic world creation. These include the creation of mise en abyme and an engagement with Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic ‘themes of the self’ and ‘themes of vision’, which are expressed by inexplicable narrative elements such as a continually burning house fire. Drawing on German idealism and Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony to counteract traditional notions of mimetic realism, Kaufman portrays his film world (and the world itself) as chaotic. But whereas Kaufman’s film embraces the chaos of becoming inherent in Schlegel’s philosophy, its protagonist suffers from a complete inability to engage with life on any authentic level and subsequently fails as an artist and person.

This chapter continues the analysis of the second part of The Concept of Irony. Here Kierkegaard introduces the irony of the German Romantics as a contrastive form of irony to that of Socrates. The chapter begins with Kierkegaard’s account of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity, which, he claims (following Hegel), is the forerunner of Romantic irony. This then leads to Kierkegaard’s account of the appropriation of Fichte’s theory by the Romantics Friedrich von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. This chapter also introduces one of Kierkegaard’s great mentors, Poul Martin Møller, who was likewise interested in an analysis of Romantic irony as a form of modern nihilism. We see how Kierkegaard is critical of Romantic irony as “historically unjustified,” while he continues his praise of Socratic irony. Finally, the chapter continues the biographical narrative of Kierkegaard’s life with an account of his broken engagement with Regine Olsen.

This book locates how civil society organizations, partnerships, and associations are being mobilized in response to market failure and state failure. This is related to critical governance studies and explores two political strategies that seek to recontextualize the significance of civil society. One strategy is individual and collective self-responsibilization to lighten the governance burdens of local and central states. The other is collective self-emancipation through social innovation, community mobilization, and creating the commons to limit or escape the constraints of market and state. Thus, governance can be located at the intersection of networks and solidarity as alternatives to market exchange and hierarchical command. The book will juxtapose 'romantic public irony' to fatalism, stoicism, cynicism, or opportunism.