Romanticism in the Age of World Wars: Introduction to the Forum

Perhaps more than any other era in literary historiography, Romanticism is defined by war; its pivotal dates anchored in key junctures of wars then raging in the background. The commonly accepted system of dating Romanticism thus alleges that the period properly started as new modes of thought and expression took root following the French Revolution of 1789, developed through the ensuing seven Wars of the Coalitions from 1792, and began to peter out when the latter ended in 1815, to conclude entirely around 1830. The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, serves as a convenient turning point, typically taken to signpost the transition from wartime to peacetime: it defined the nature of modern warfare in an event of unprecedented and unrepeated proportions, involving some "200,000 men . . . on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles) square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield" (Barbero 311). A landmark moment in the history of modern war, Waterloo can also be read as signaling the decline of Romanticism. From about 1815, Romantic thought is seen to divide against itself; into a precursor phase of confident, self-possessed production, followed by a secondary wind-down period marked by hesitant, self-deprecating reproduction (Nemoianu). This oft-alleged deflation of Romanticism following the conclusion of hostilities in 1815 holds a disquieting implication: war appears to be a necessary condition for Romanticism to inhabit itself fully. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly observes in his 1798 poem "Fears in Solitude," Romantic poetry originates in war, which exercises the passions and the imagination as it is brought home through a fast-expanding machinery of periodical publication. In Coleridge's reading, Romantic literature operates an aesthetic ideology which converts violence and conflict into bracing messages of sympathetic national unity, leaving behind the realities of war as a destabilizing if largely unobserved remainder:

                                   Boys and girls,And women, that would groan to see a childPull off an insect's leg, all read of war,The best amusement for our morning-meal!The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayersFrom curses, who knows scarcely words enoughTo ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,Becomes a fluent phraseman, absoluteAnd technical in victories and deceit,And all our dainty terms for fratricide;Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tonguesLike mere abstractions, empty sounds to whichWe join no feeling and attach no form!

(Coleridge 6)

The reading of Romanticism through its interaction with war, here briefly modelled by Coleridge in his "Fears" poem, has become an important feature of the scholarship on the period. Still, claims like Betty T. Bennett's contention that war was "the single most important fact of British life from 1793–1815" (ix) were long refuted or ignored. For much of the field's history, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the most influential critical accounts held that Romantic poetics orchestrated an extrication of writing from its historical and material conditions. As Jerome McGann notes, a key Romantic ideology, reflexively copied by many a critic, is that great poems "develop different sorts of artistic means . . . to occlude and disguise their own involvement in a certain nexus of historical relations," so that history is present in a sublimated form (12). Such constructed universality was hailed as a significant literary achievement, with the added boon of reflecting formalist and deconstructive inclinations; in critical terms, it was regarded as a collectivized attempt at digesting the disappointment of the Revolution. The shift towards New Historicism in the late 1980s and 1990s had a momentous impact in reangling the reading of history as it is enacted or ostensibly suppressed by texts. The methodological and theoretical groundwork laid by Marjorie Levinson and her co-authors (1989) and further developed by James Chandler (1998) and others enabled a growing sense that poems such as "Fears" testify to a deep imbrication in history that shaped even texts apparently dissociated from their circumstances, and that history particularly asserted itself through references to the...