Beyond Romanticism

New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832

Stephen Copley, John Whale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317272540
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1992. Beyond Romanticism represents a substantial challenge to traditional views of the Romantic period and provides a sustained critique of 'Romantic ideology'. The debates with which it engages had previously been under-represented in the study of Romanticism, where the claims of history had never had quite the same status as they have had in other periods, and where confidence in poetic literary value remains high.

Individual essays examine the philosophical underpinnings of Romantic discourse; they survey analogous and competing discourses of the period such as mesmerism, Hellenism, orientalism and nationalism; and analyse both the manifestations of Romanticism in particular historical and textual moments, and the texts and modes of writing which have been historically marginalized or silenced by 'the Romantic'. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

1Introduction

Stephen Copley and John Whale

DOI: 10.4324/9781315638942-1

I

A ‘new’ eighteenth century has recently been announced. In justification it has been claimed that literary criticism of the period on both sides of the Atlantic has resisted theory. To make such a claim for the Romantic period would be thought absurd. Romantic criticism has long been theoretically sophisticated: over the past twenty years it has represented the peak of applied deconstructive and poststructuralist critical practice. With its classic expressions of individualism Romantic literature offered itself as a prime site for deconstruction’s rigorous questioning of self-presence. This is not to suggest, of course, that Romantic studies have been equally theorized on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain the Romantics industry never was apocalyptic in the American manner and still has a strong traditional identity: recent opposition to the predominantly empirical British Romantic establishment has itself tended to remain empirical in nature.

Within this opposition, two important strands can be distinguished. The first is best represented by Marilyn Butler’s achievement in questioning the Romantic canon. As a fiction specialist, she originally dealt with figures such as Edgeworth, Peacock and even Austen, which Romanticism often excluded solely on the grounds of genre. The focus of her work set her apart from her highly theorized American counterparts in the 1970s, and her outsider status was confirmed by the fact that she was primarily a contextualizer rather than an interpreter. Her earlier work depended on the self-evident effects of contextualizing, and the labelling of movements within the framework of a largely traditional history of ideas, and culminated in the admirably clear and, at the same time, specialized study Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries in 1981.

Her important contribution to the debate on Romanticism in this period was to extend it, multiply it and sub-divide it. Her recent work has shown signs of a more explicit engagement with theory. However, it still largely depends for its impact on adding to the list of authors in the Romantic period. If this is indeed a subversive strategy in the politics of canon-formation, its empiricism has more in common with traditional British scholarship than with a radical assault on positivism as Marjorie Levinson has rather extravagantly claimed.¹ Marilyn Butler has provided a more varied authorial and socially orientated diet in the Romantic period. Her revivalism is scholarly and pragmatic, and her revisionism remains firmly based on the criteria of literary merit.

The other strand of oppositional work deployed its empiricism strategically in pursuit of explicitly political ends. Within the British New Left, such important figures as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams saw a preoccupation with theory as a negation of political engagement. This stance left its legacy in a distinctly British form of radical historical criticism, soft-voiced and sceptical in its encounter with theory, but strongly engaged in its reading of Romantic texts and projects.

John Barrell is one of the most impressive representatives of this approach. His work across different cultural practices – painting, aesthetics, poetry, social theory and landscape – has always been more strategically ordered than Butler’s. The exclusions it ‘remedies’ (the case of Clare, for example) indicate a questioning perception of the notion of ‘culture’ itself, rather than the liberal eclecticism of Butler. Most importantly, perhaps, his intense concentration on the discourse of civic humanism across the eighteenth century to its demise in the Romantic period reads in his different books both as a meticulous scholarly description and as a radical polemical construction, available to those willing to take hold of its implications. Barrell’s political enterprise has been worked out in the intensive and strong-minded empiricism of scholarship. Whilst dealing with theories of culture and society he has rarely invoked theory in a self-conscious way on behalf of his own methodology.

Now that the political possibilities of deconstruction and post-structuralism are being significantly reassessed, young critics in the Romantic period also have an opportunity for revaluing work which has, albeit empirically, extended or seriously qualified the idea of a Romantic canon. It is a situation which could benefit from a consideration of both early and late Raymond Williams. At a time when new developments in the literary use of history have led to a widespread revision of critical practices his is an important example of a particularly productive mediation of cultural study and political analysis. Invoking this British context provides a convenient reminder of the different contexts which produce Romantic studies: the fractures, instabilities and limits of Anglo-American Romantic scholarship.

The contributors to this volume do not necessarily draw on the same intellectual or political history. Rather, they represent some of the new voices and methodologies which are now contributing to the rapidly changing face of Romantic studies on both sides of the Atlantic. In a variety of forms of committed criticism they challenge past claims for Romantic transcendence and see the value of exploring the period’s cultural productions outside the prevailing – often narrowly literary – terms of Romanticism. Significantly composed of both Romantic insiders and outsiders, this volume gives voice to a new generation of younger British critics.

II

The dominant force in American Romantic criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s was clearly Paul de Man. His influence – exerted through such essays as The rhetoric of temporality’ and The intentional structure of the Romantic image’ – was instrumental in making the Romantics one of the prime sites of applied deconstruction. No longer could critics write innocently or confidently about such supposed dualisms of Romantic thought and practice as nature and supernature, subject and object, and, most particularly, symbol and allegory. Gone were the unified verbal icons of the New Criticism and the systematic myth-makings of Bloom and Abrams. Romantic poetry was now to be read intertextually – though predominantly still poet against poet, the literary against itself. As Arden Reed claimed in the introduction to his significantly titled Romanticism and Language ‘deconstruction offers a way to interrogate the ideologies by which earlier critics had underwritten Romanticism while still allowing for, if not encouraging, a sustained reading of that literature’ (Reed 1984: 17). This draws attention both to the subversive power of applied deconstruction within the academy and to its ambiguous, even collusive relationship with the literary. The iconoclasm of its disfigurings remained ill-defined. At the same time, the question of its ability to move beyond the narrowly ‘literary’ is raised with his admission, in the same introduction, that: ‘Perhaps the most powerful approach on the margin of this volume is the historical, and it is at least worth raising the question how far an historical outlook is compatible with such close reading as is practised here’ (Reed 1984: 18). Dissatisfaction with what was thought to be de Man’s legacy of ‘formalist’ poststructuralism was also voiced in terms of its failure to account for the role of the reader in the literary transaction. Again the cry was for a widening of the perceived deconstructionist boundaries; at some level an opening out to the ‘world’, even if in terms of textual transactions. Tilottama Rajan’s ‘Displacing poststructuralism: Romantic studies after Paul de Man’ (Rajan 1985: 474) concludes with an appeal which reaches beyond reader-response theory to a recognition of reading as a ‘self-differing appropriation and enactment of the text’, of reading itself as ‘dialogical’ – to use Bakhtin’s term.

In the wake of Paul de Man and the high point of deconstruction, Romantic critics on both sides of the Atlantic have now turned to new methodologies: theories of audience, genre, the new historicisms; and, as with deconstruction, have made them their own. Just as the Yale critics moved from Romantic text to ‘pure’ theory, so too, in the new phase, Romantic studies are rejigging themselves in the quest for ideas, and in the light of the recent ‘return to history’ which has taken place generally in literary studies. Characteristically, in this process Romantic criticism continues its struggle simultaneously to define and be rid of itself, a doubleness symptomatic of the continuing dialectical relationship between Romantic construction and Romantic critique. Even the most flamboyant new voices in the recent debate continue to wrestle with a definition of ‘the Romantic’ at the same time as claiming to have found a way out of its ideology. In this way there remains a danger that an incipient colonialism can be effected where a denial is thought to be taking place, so that definitions of ‘the Romantic ideology’, the modern and the assumption of a ‘postmodern condition’ can easily begin to merge.

Perhaps the most obvious turning point in the new phase came from an unexpected quarter: Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) which produced the buzz phrase of ‘the Romantic ideology’. Strangely, McGann’s hardening of Romanticism into an ideology, using Heine’s model of historical self-consciousness, was surrounded with an appreciation of the human qualities to be found in Romantic texts. As Clifford Siskin² has astutely pointed out, ideology in this context was being used in a peculiarly specific way which could actually have the effect of glorifying ‘the Romantic’: the attempt to put limits on Romanticism so as to contain it resulted in a dangerous act of reification.

When the new historicisms have encountered Romantic studies they have found it impossible to invoke a centralized object of power (Klancher 1989: 77). Romanticism can itself lay claim to be a counter-culture, even a marginalized resistance movement. Critics of Romanticism can ‘assume neither a new historicist’s identification of power and culture, nor their Romantic opposition’. So, while there is a danger of assuming a watertight and centralized system of power (the negative possibility arrived at by some of their Renaissance counterparts), the possibilities of a transgressive potential have to be even more carefully screened.

In this respect the rethinking of ‘history’ in Romantic studies can be seen as a point of contestation with the Renaissance – with what has been so confidently named the ‘New Historicism’. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marjorie Levinson should open her own Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History with: ‘We have had more than enough reflections on “the new historicism’” (Levinson 1989: 1). Her statement is characteristically shocking and paradoxical. She sees the critic in the position of ‘Schlegel’s prophet looking backwards’ (ibid.: 21), recognizes the impossibility of escaping the bind of history and so performs a double-act which turns it against itself. In this respect she takes the new historicists to task for attempting to redeem the time – for imagining the possibility of a freedom of choice either from the privileged academy or by projection back onto the poets of the past. Similarly, Jon Klancher identifies a collusion between Renaissance New Historicism and forms of postmodernism as they ‘probe the delicate semiosis of history, culture, and power’ (Klancher 1989: 77). Where one ‘discloses power’ the other displays and worships it; and ‘the risk lies’, according to Klancher, ‘in making historical criticism a transhistorical echo of the politics of the present’ (ibid.).

If Klancher is scathing about New Historicism and urgent in his plea that English Romantic studies take on the issues raised by ‘cultural materialism’, Gayatri Spivak has launched a more general attack on the New Historicism as ‘a sort of academic media hype mounted against deconstruction’ (Spivak 1989: 280). She seriously questions the New Historicism’s often glib, or strategic, assumptions of a materialist analysis; its unjustified claim to be dealing with a ‘something else’ beyond text. More particularly, she sees the very term ‘history’ only possible as ‘catachresis’ – an improper use of words – or, in her terms, ‘a metaphor without an adequate literal referent’ (ibid.: 279). Her position resists the claim for a theoretical difference assumed by the New Historicism, and vigorously maintains a continuity with de Manian deconstruction and, even if rather ambiguously and negatively, with her own distinctly un-postmodern version of Foucault. Like both Foucault and de Man she offers the possibilities of a ‘literal’ reading, a practice which attempts to resist the authoritarianism or the self-righteous moralizations of a symptomatic reading of the text. For her the text is to be lover or accomplice rather than patient or analysand. For example, in her stimulating analysis of sex in The Prelude she explains:

In these pages I have read a poetic text attempting to cope with a revolution and paternity. I have not asked the critic to be hostile to poetry or to doubt the poet’s good faith; although I have asked her to examine the unquestioning reverence or – on the part of the poets themselves – the credulous vanity that seems to be our disciplinary requirement.

(Spivak 1987: 76)

At the same time as providing an illuminating and creatively disruptive negotiation of a canonical Romantic text Spivak provides a helpful reminder, in face of the persuasively new, of the continuing debate and argument which must take place between deconstruction, poststructuralism and historicism.

III

Part of the historical conundrum which besets properly self-conscious Romantic studies is the already doubled nature of the Romantic construct – not only in terms of subject/object and transcendence, but also in its institutional history. Appearing after the event, and in the wake of its literary objects, the Romantic is always already retrospective. The implications of this rebound even on the claims of a critic like McGann who sets so much store by a liberating self-consciousness. In this sense, Romantic criticism’s relationship to theory might be said to include the overbearing claims of pre-empting it.

In this context, a familiar strategy in Romantic criticism is to go to where the binaries are often thought to begin – in the philosophical discourse of the knowledge of the object. Invoking epistemological and ontological questions rather than ‘material histories’ can give the impression of going straight to the heart of the matter instead of setting out on a perilous voyage of discovery. Once again, however, all the hazards of replicating a familiar Romantic site must be faced. The critic remains in danger of simply swapping the role of questor for that of contemplative thinker; and, in any case, the expectation of release or transcendence only duplicates an act of (bad) faith.

In the 1980s there have been various exciting attempts to find meaningful others with which to prize open or escape from the claims of what is often considered to be an all-embracing ‘Romantic ideology’. Many of these might be better thought of as related to larger movements in literary practice and theory, rather than specifically to the claims of Jerome McGann’s Romantic Ideology (1983) – even if one accepts his claim that lack of self-consciousness had typified much Romantic criticism. These others – notably the body – have been used, as is so often the case of others, to reflect back on what Thomas McFarland, with self-conscious and unabashed idealism, has referred to on more than one occasion as the mountain range of Romanticism (McFarland 1987: 15–24). Material histories have repeatedly been ushered in to speak against Romantic transcendence. Once again, however, a potential problem arises in that either these outsiders can be invoked in a way which defies the logic of poststructuralism’s pervasive textuality; or, even if they don’t, they can be reappropriated too easily on the grounds of the old Romantic argument. Slavery, bodies, ruins, revolution and political economy can be seen as the very things which provide the springboard for such Romantic transcendence, and are thereby included in the very fabric of its idealizing power.

More recently there have been attempts to reassess Romanticism by posing it against other cultural institutions, notably the national, civic, military and imperial structures of culture with which it is implicated and which it is supposedly matched against. At their most sophisticated such studies locate the exchanges, or the transferences, which take place between these cultural sites rather than simply bringing them to light. Straightforward discovery is no longer the point. The usability of institutional counters is precisely that they can be seen to possess a discursive rather than an object quality. At this point they meet up with the wealth of Foucauldian discourse analyses which many critics are currently producing. And it is precisely the discursive quality of these analyses which takes them out of the imperative to define the Romantic. Discursivity might be seen as a way of escaping the push to transcendence.

Recent interest in political economy and the sublime represents a return to old areas of enquiry, but with new poststructuralist horizons. Revaluation of the sublime came in the late 1970s, within the Romantic period, with Thomas Weiskel’s pioneering study The Romantic Sublime (1976). It was further sophisticate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘A Shadow of a Magnitude': The Dialectic of Romantic Aesthetics
• 3 Land of the Giants: Gaps, Limits and Audiences in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
• 4 Shelley's ‘Magnetic Ladies’: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body
• 5 Jerusalem and Nationalism
• 6 ‘The Voice Which is Contagion to the World': The Bacchic in Shelley
• 7 The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory After 1760
• 8 Plagiarism with a Difference: Subjectivity in ‘Kubla Khan' and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
• 9 De Quincey and Women
• 10 Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams
• 11 Wordsworth and the Use of Charity
• 12 Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art
• Bibliography
• Index