Annales Romantiques

 

One of the most influential anthologies of the first-generation avant-garde, the Annales Romantiques were yearly compendia of work by the Romanticist underground, published from 1823–1838 and thus covering nearly the whole period of the concentrated Romanticist assault on culture. It provides the most textured and complete window into the Parisian Romanticist community of the time, when that community was still in the process of defining itself; for rather than focusing like retrospective anthologies on the few most canonized representatives of the movement, the Annales printed work by between 60 and 80 Romanticist writers each year, and provide a comprehensive glimpse of the entire community, including avant-gardists who never published complete books and represented only here and in various journals that have lain nearly unread since 1835. The Avant-Garde archivist Charles Asselineau devoted two chapters to the series in the first bibliography of avant-garde literature, his 1866 Miscellanies Drawn from a Small Romanticist Library, to the Annales for this very reason, with an eloquent appeal for greater awareness and respect for the totality of creative communities involved in collective efforts for cultural change.