The”Neo-Romantics” Are Just Nostalgic

Unofficially, my piece last winter for Wisdom of Crowds, “Are you sure you want to be a romanticist?”—the most cited and argued-with essay I’ve ever written—has become one of the founding documents of what we really should call Substack Romanticism, insofar as most of the people who are using the terminology of romanticism unironically run Substacks. I now also run, along with three esteemed colleague-editors, a Substack publication called Romanticon. The larger point is that the term “romance,” “romanticism,” has contemporary use and is proving memetically adaptable. Detractors don’t seem to be able to kill it, nor are promoters able to kill it by too much praise.