Romantic Prose Fiction (review)

When the International Comparative Literature Association made the decision to launch its landmark Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages in 1967, the icla was still a relatively young organization (it had been founded just a decade earlier), and the study of Comparative Literature had not yet fully established itself as a central academic discipline, especially in European universities. Given those circumstances, it seems in retrospect not only farsighted, but indeed audacious, for the early leaders of the ICLA to have undertaken such an ambitious and unprecedented scholarly project. That this undertaking has flourished is testimony not only to the energy and acumen of those who have guided the project over the decades, but is also a recognition of the respected place the series has earned among comparatists and in the scholarly world at large.

The icla standing committee that oversees the chlel series and commissions new volumes has over the years made some significant and appropriate adjustments to the scope and compass of the project, expanding it to include, for example, several volumes specifically dedicated to the literatures of the Caribbean and the literatures of East-Central Europe. Like the groups of volumes in the series that focus on specific geographical areas, the five-volume Romanticism “cluster” (of which the present volume is the fifth and final part) constitutes a kind of project-within-aproject, and not merely a topical subdivision. Romantic Prose Fiction, moreover, is in some respects the capstone of the Romanticism project, adding the final strands to the dense and extensive web of connections and parallels among the contributions to all five volumes. Like its companion volumes, Romantic Prose Fiction is neither a handbook, an encyclopedia, nor a narrative history—it is, rather, a deftly shaped and unusually multidimensional collection of individual topical studies. Its editors sensibly eschew any attempt to define Romanticism itself, choosing instead to treat it as a concept or phenomenon whose contours and meaning may be vigorously contested but whose importance and continuing resonance cannot. To some extent, of course, this was a tactical—indeed practical—choice, given the extent of the scholarly and critical literature on the nature of Romanticism and the inevitable futility of trying to “settle” the issue, especially from a comparative or transnational perspective. Similarly, the editors have wisely chosen not to encumber their project by reviving and belaboring all the controversies that have swirled—and continue to swirl—around the term “comparative.” As Gerald Gillespie succinctly puts it in his editorial statement:

[O]ur “history” of Romantic prose fiction is “comparative” in several regards. It routinely crosses linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries, and it deliberately recontextualizes Romanticism in multiple generic strands and at many historical-cultural junctures. The present volume does not limit itself to monumentalizing Romantic imaginative writing and discourse as something marooned in the past, even though the peculiarities of its “pastness” are important in several chapters. Rather, the volume provides, at least in the form of a sketch or outline, a sense of how certain powerful moments or factors in culture—here in the instance of Romanticism—become built-in as active elements of the cultural repertory, maintain a certain discursive potency, inspire new imaginative writing, and serve as motivation or pretext for attempts to veer away in new directions.

(“Introduction” xx)

It should be acknowledged at this point that many readers—particularly those who were trained in departments of Comparative Literature at Anglo-American universities in the last decades of the twentieth century—may be somewhat surprised to find a number of contributions to this volume in which neither the vocabulary nor the theoretical frameworks they have come to expect in much of contemporary comparative practice seem to be at play (in many of the bibliographies attached to the individual chapters they may also notice the relative absence of the ritual—and often preemptive—deference to certain canonical names). This is no accident: the editors have made a “conscious effort to distance themselves from the...