Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (review)

The ‘primary aim’ of Romanticism and the Uses of Genre is ‘not to study the development’ or the uses of ‘individual genres’ in the Romantic period but ‘to investigate broader patterns’ in that period’s ‘genre theory and practice’. The book’s argument is that British Romanticism displays a ‘hyperconsciousness’ about, and a ‘clash of attitudes’ towards, genre that is ‘comparable’ to the ‘opposed’ generic ‘theories’ and ‘heightened consciousness’ of genre characteristic of German Romanticism. While suggesting that British Romanticism was ‘generally of an empirical rather than speculative bent’, and marked by a ‘creative practice’ that ran ‘in advance of theory’ (where in German Romanticism ‘generic experimentation is often theory-driven and critical speculation arguably exceeds practical accomplishment’), Duff quite rightly insists that ‘theory is crucial’ to British Romanticism’s engagement with genre and persuasively demonstrates this. Pitching his study as ‘an attempt to see the [Romantic] genre-system as a whole’, he ‘appeals to German theory’, particularly its ‘fuller conceptualization of genre-mixing’, to ‘help interpret British developments’, and does so with considerable success. Most importantly, perhaps, his study powerfully posits a reading of the Romantic period in Britain (as well as in Germany), as ‘the age of the Mischgedicht’ – the ‘generically mixed work’ – establishing both the inaccuracy of any reading of Romanticism as ‘anti-genre’ and the ‘inadequacy’ of any ‘monogeneric classification system’ to describe either the literary culture of that age or its greatest poetic achievements.

Discussing a wide range of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anthologies, critical essays and treatises on the art of poetry, Chapter 1 charts the ‘different phases of neoclassicism’, from ‘“high” neoclassicism’ through to the ‘mid-eighteenth-century’ phase of ‘critical resistance to the doctrine of “rules”’ and ‘Enlightenment modifications of the neoclassical paradigm’, to demonstrate that it was an ‘eclectic mixture of ancient and modern ideas’ that ‘confronted Romantic writers when they turned to the subject of genre’, rather than the ‘narrower doctrines of earlier neoclassical critics’. Duff argues that ‘the transition from neoclassicism to Romanticism’ did not therefore involve any straightforward ‘liberation from the concept of [generic] rules’ but, instead, a ‘clash’ between ‘generic and anti-generic tendencies’ that resulted in a ‘rethinking of genres’ as ‘cognitive’, ‘psychological’ and/or ‘emotional’ ‘modes’ of thought and discourse, ‘rather than purely formal constructs’.

The remaining chapters of the study concentrate on exploring and elucidating ‘the depth and complexity of Romantic writers’ engagement with genre’. Chapter 2 maps out the ‘opposing currents’ within the ‘genre theory of the “high” Romantic period’, examining ‘parallels between Britain and Germany’ and ‘taking Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry as a paradigm’ for the debates ‘about genre that took place in both countries’. These debates saw the ‘politicization of genre’ and ‘new theories of form’, most famously ‘organic form’, but also a multitude of ‘contradictory attitudes’, ‘ambivalence’, ‘tensions and confusions’ and theoretical ‘difficulties’. The British points of focus here are Wordsworth’s prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads and Poems (1815) and Coleridge’s lectures and essays, but along the way the chapter also refers to Baillie, Thelwall, ‘Peter Pindar’, Isaac D’Israeli and others, convincingly demonstrating that the ‘Romantic literary revolution’ did not involve ‘the displacement of one literary paradigm (mimetic, objective, generic) by another (expressive, subjective, organic)’ so much as a ‘prolonged and fertile conflict between the two’.

Chapter 3 takes on the ‘traditional’ reading of Romanticism’s ‘rejection of didacticism’ by foregrounding the ways in which the Romantics in fact ‘make stronger claims than ever for the moral and political utility of literature, and for the role of the author as teacher, legislator, prophet, or healer’. While conceding the anti-didactic impulses within Romantic literary theory and practice, Duff also highlights the Romantic ‘fashion’ for ‘didactic genres such as the georgic and “philosophical poem”’, the ‘didactic tendencies in other Romantic genres’ and the connection between these trends in British Romanticism and contemporary German ideas about ‘aesthetic education’. Duff’s principal point here is that while Romantic theory wrestles with...