Angela Esterhammer explores how the professional practice of improvisation contributes to Romantic ideas and explores poetic improvisation in nineteenth-century fiction.

Angela Esterhammer is Professor in the Department of English, University of Zurich and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Previous books include Romantic Poetry. The Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (edited, 2002) and The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000).

1. This lightning of the mind: improvisation and performance in the Romantic era; 2. Defining improvisation and improvising national identity: from grand tourists to Della Cruscans; 3. Importing improvisation: oral performance and print culture in the age of Goethe; 4. Was Homer an improvvisatore?: histories of improvisation in antiquarian scholarship and popular culture; 5. The spectacle of the Romantic improviser: Corilla, Corinne, and British women poets of the 1820s; 6. Stars of the post-Napoleonic stage: Rosa Taddei, Tommaso Sgricci, and their audiences; 7. Byron, Hoffmann, and the improvisational worlds of carnival and commedia; 8. Sociability, social practice, and the Bildungsroman of the 1830s; 9. The improviser's disorder: adventurers and misfits in nineteenth-century fiction; 10. Virtuosi, vaudevillians, mystics, madmen, and rhetoricians: improvisational contexts of the nineteenth century; Afterword.