romanticism as enlightenment critique

coming into the conversation as someone who has thought about the meaning of 'romanticism' as a unifying term for a cluster of texts whose qualities were in some ways vastly different, i would be interested in hearing what the definition is of "american romanticism" and in what ways it differs from the british one while it keeps the same label. this question is of interest to me in part because of the pressure to resist what has been termed 'romantic ideology' and the legacy of texts' and writers' pressure on readers to read the texts without the permission to question the relationship between their ideological and textual qualities.

one of the most productive ways of thinking about romanticism for me has been as a critique of enlightenment: in its most canonical british iterations, romantic poems (think, 'lyrical ballads' and such) made it impossible not to see the tensions inherent in 'modernity' and argued (think preface to the 'lyrical ballads') how textual production and interpretation would bring about the social change in a world structured by textual production. these kinds of arguments always bring up conversations like the one we had last week, about who gets to participate, at what cost, and who gets to be excluded and pitied, but not necessarily helped or saved.

i will end at this: a very interesting recent 'commentary' on the inherent contradictions of enlightenment has been jonathan israel's enlightenment contested. in a review, robert leventhal, whose full text you can find here, explains that the value of israel's work is in pointing out to the significance of spinoza in the history of enlightenment, so that spinoza restored points to some of the irreconcilable differences within the "movement":

Enlightenment Contested is an attempt to shore up the idea that there are essentially two
Enlightenments, a "moderate mainstream" Enlightenment, which was morally, socially, and politically conservative, and apologetic if not outright supportive of absolutistic monarchy, and, on the other hand, the Radical Enlightenment. The Radical Enlightenment was responsible for, first and foremost, the emergence of liberal modernity in the eighteenth century and its rejection of ecclesiastical authority, its strict differentiation between truth and belief, philosophy and religion, its insistence on human equality regardless of race, gender, and class, and its demand for the absolute freedom of expression in the public sphere. Secondly, Enlightenment Contested is a not-so-implicit critique of modern trends in cultural history, cultural studies, "new social history," and sociology of knowledge. Focused not on the institutions, settings, milieux, written media, cultural contexts, or socioeconomic and political structures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Israel is unapologetic about doing "high" intellectual history, a history of ideas, or Ideengeschichte. His argumentation seeks at every turn to show how Spinozism and spinozistic ideas, diffused and disseminated, repeatedly surface in the texts of Radical Enlightenment thinkers and threaten the existing sociopolitical and sociocultural order and how Spinoza and Spinozism represent the single most significant rupture with tradition and pave the way for the revolutions of the second half of the eighteenth century, not to mention our own democratic values, ideals, and aspirations even today.