The Romantic and Symbolist movements reconfigured imagination by shifting symbolic construal toward the ineffable, the sublime, and the alternative. If the novel foregrounded individual interiority, Romanticism radicalised this gesture, insisting that imagination itself was a force of world-making, capable of unveiling dimensions of possibility inaccessible to rational order or inherited tradition.
Romantic poetry and art staged possibility as excess — nature as boundless, feeling as infinite, spirit as uncontainable. The horizon of construal was no longer the collective cosmos or the individuated life alone, but the transformative power of imagination itself. To imagine was to actualise a symbolic field beyond the given: the visionary, the dreamlike, the untamed.
By the late nineteenth century, Symbolism pushed this tendency further, constructing elaborate aesthetic systems where art no longer represented the world but generated autonomous worlds of its own. In Mallarmé’s poetry, in Redon’s lithographs, in Wagner’s music dramas, possibility was conjured as pure symbolic resonance — layered correspondences without fixed referent, immersive environments of meaning and suggestion.
Together, Romantic and Symbolist imaginaries inaugurated a new mode of construal: the symbolic as alternative, as a deliberate expansion of the field of possibility beyond social order, moral code, or empirical fact. They offered not maps of reality but openings into otherness — portals to what might be, to what could be felt, seen, or intuited at the limits of experience.
This was imagination unbound: not explanation, not narrative coherence, but an ongoing invitation to dwell in the potentiality of worlds otherwise.
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