Inside and Outside Romanticism

The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy by Ian Balfour. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 346. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Historical Austen by William H. Galperin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 286. $39.95 cloth.

Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory by Paul Hamilton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 316. $25.00 paper.

The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period edited by Steven E. Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. 231. $55.00 cloth.

The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism by Marc Redfield. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 252. $55.00 cloth.

William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s by Saree Makdisi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 394. $22.00 paper.

Little can be taken for granted in Romantic studies. The canon has been expanding since the 1990s, and what is familiar—the Big Six poets—has been variously reconfigured. "Romantic-era literature" usually designates the writing in the fifty years from 1780 to 1830, but there is also the long eighteenth century that subsumes Romanticism within non-Romantic literary-historical narratives, and some periodizations lay claim to a Romantic century, 1750 to 1850, colonizing both the age of Johnson and the early Victorian period. Identifying something called Romanticism, always a risky enterprise (Arthur Lovejoy [1924] and Irving Massey [1964] demonstrated the incoherence of the concept),¹ is no less risky but has not stopped the construction of multiple Romanticisms, from Anne Mellor's female Romanticism (1992) to Jerome McGann's poetry of sensibility (1996).² "Romanticism" is the interpretive sense we make of Romantic-era literature by means of diachronic and synchronic narratives. That there are multiple narratives does not render the concept useless, but Romanticism must be understood in the plural. In the wake of the feminist and historicist dismantling of the older Romanticism, especially Bloom's "visionary company" and the Wordsworth-centered poetry of consciousness and nature, one has to ask whether one of the goals of the new interpreters has been achieved: are we still reading Romanticism by means of its own constructions, or have we so far removed ourselves from the assumptions of Romantic texts that we are finally outside of Romanticism? Do we want to be outside of Romanticism? Is it possible to get outside of Romanticism? Are we finally free of Romantic ideology?

Not to leave anyone in suspense, I will answer my own questions: yes, no, impossible to say, no, no. We are still within Romanticism, despite the strenuous efforts to propel us out of its gravitational force, for any number of reasons. As even Romanticism's harshest critics, such as Clifford Siskin, illustrate, our world is still shaped by Romantic assumptions about, among other things, psychological development.³ Genealogies of contemporary literary culture can hardly skip over Romanticism, whether it is the lines of influence drawn by Bloom or by McGann, whether the line is continued by a neo-Romantic like Ted Hughes or a language poet like Charles Bernstein. When we use Derridean mixing of philosophy and literature to interpret Romantic texts, we are repeating Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Jena Romantikers in their aphorisms. As Freud readily conceded, the Romantics wrote extensively about the unconscious years before his own Interpretation of Dreams. Feminist theorists can and do quarrel with the texts of Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson, but feminist theory, as a modern intellectual enterprise, begins with these Romantics. In the Romantic era one finds numerous anticipations of Marx and his sociopolitical critique, as well as early versions of socialism, communism, anarchism, and social democracy. The British Empire makes huge advances, culturally and politically, but concurrently receives fundamental criticism. Similarly, the slave trade peaks at the same time that also includes a well-developed abolitionist movement. Ecocriticism has evolved largely out of Anglo-American Romanticism. Moreover, there is also the Gadamerian argument that Romanticism is one of the things that has shaped our pre...