Romanticism and improvisation, 1750-1850 / Angela Esterhammer.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 248-262) and index.

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