Scholarly investigations of the politics of Romanticism and the role of emotion in Romanticism have been at the forefront of Romantic studies for some decades now, but these two fields of study have typically moved in different directions. Moreover, both fields have focused primarily on what we might loosely call âliteraryâ works (whether canonical or not). The current collection departs from this wide body of scholarship in that it addresses the multiple and varied links between politics and the emotions in the periodical press from the 1790s to the early 1830s. It approaches this complex topic through analyses of both the politics of emotion and the emotional registers of political discourse in the public sphere. Its value as a collection, as distinct from a monograph, lies in the variety of perspectives it brings to bear on the topic. The volume thus offers a study of the rich combination of politics, emotions, and print media during the Romantic period in Britain. In shifting the focus this way, it extends our understanding of the contested and complex relations between politics and feelings at that particular historical juncture. Although not its primary concern, it also raises important questions relevant to contemporary debates between practitioners of affect studies and political criticism . These are addressed in the first two sections of this introductory essay. In section three, we set out an argument for the importance of studying periodicals in this context, while section four provides a summary of the essays that comprise the collection.
The volume is necessarily selective, both in the specific dimensions of politics and emotions discussed, and in its choice of periodicals . This selection is characterised by several recurring themes, including the contested place of the emotions in radical political discourse; the role of print media in mediating âimmediateâ action and performance; the changing affective frameworks of cultural politics, especially those having to do with gender and nation; and the shifting terrain of what constitutes appropriate emotions in public political discourse. What emerges from these recurring themes is a rich sense of the uneven and contradictory relations between radical and reformist discourses, and between different âclassâ publications as they grappled with the emotions as part of their political agendas. To that end , the periodicals selected for analysis range from handbills through popular weekly publications and later more extensive weeklies of politics and culture, to both specialised and generalist monthly magazines and quarterly reviews. While the majority of the publications addressed in the collection sit on the radical/reformist side of politics , there are also several whose politics are fundamentally conservative.
Romanticism and Politics
It is now almost 40 years since Jerome McGann published The Romantic Ideology (1983), a book whose iconic title encapsulated the tone of a variety of political criticism in Romantic studies that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by contemporary Marxist critics such as Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Terry Eagleton, McGann argued that Romantic poetry, in its efforts to transcend the material conditions within which it was produced, is characterised by acts of âdisplacementâ, âocclusionâ, âerasureâ, and âevasionâ, with the aim of criticism being to âshow the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making ⌠about which it is necessarily silentâ (Eagleton 1976, 43). In the wake of the revisionary enterprise begun by McGann and of the revisionary history of Marilyn Butlerâs Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981), critical and cultural analyses of Romantic literature took up a position in wilful and explicit contrast to what they saw as a two-hundred-year-old tendency to play right into the hands of a Wordsworthian Romanticism by uncritically accepting its rapt privacies and spiritual hierarchies, along with its suppression of the historical and political temporality of the text (Christie 2009). Reading âagainst the grainâ from the vantage point of the present, such an approach had in its sights, not just the gaps and silences of Romantic poetry and the historical dilemmas that generated them, but also an earlier generation of critics such as Harold Bloom, M. H. Abrams, and Geoffrey Hartman. Where Abrams had sought to recover a high-minded, creative optimism, for example, this new generation of Romanticists discovered an often self-deluding, self-defeating evasiveness.
Political criticism of this kind was ultimately concerned with the workings of power: how power relations operated in a society, and how those power relations functioned in literary works. Initially a form of what became known as âideology critiqueâ, it generated a range of critical positions in the 1980s and 1990s which sought greater knowledge of historical specificities within which, and against which, to read literary texts. These positions have sometimes been categorised loosely as the ânew historicismâ, a term made fashionable by Stephen Greenblatt and others in relation to Renaissance studies. Yet as David Simpson has argued, the new historicism in Romantic studies emerged in a very different context from that in Renaissance studies. In contradistinction to the latter, where ârepresentation and circulation tend to replace cause and effect as the dominant mechanism of cultural energyâ (1998, 403), âthe history that was available [in Romantic studies ] was premised (especially among British critics) on an awareness of conflict and contentionâabout the French revolution and the wars that followed it, about class struggle and industrializationâ (406â407). Nevertheless, and despite significant differences between the historical work of McGann and someone like Butler, the term ânew historicismâ has tended to be used as a catch-all for work grounded in the politics and history of the period. In addition to McGann, for example, the following have also been called new historicists, despite their significant differences: James Chandler, Marjorie Levinson, Alan Liu, Clifford Siskin, and Simpson himself. Simpsonâs essay was published in 1998, but even at that late stage he was able to claim that:
historical work in Romanticism has recently been obliged to define itself in relation to new historicism, and many Romanticists have had the title of ânew historicistâ bestowed upon them, a process which has been to some degree resisted (in the interests of accuracy) and to some degree accepted (for the sake of appearing fashionable). (402)
Although at times verging on the reductive, the new historicism opened up the corpus of Romantic poetry in subtle and exciting new ways. Reflecting a few years ago on her own practice, Levinson noted that ânew historicism, unlike old, demanded reciprocityâ, âits knowledge arising at the intersection between the past and that pastâs future, namely the historianâs presentâ. The past to be taken up, she claimed, following Walter Benjamin, is ânot some randomly chosen past, but the past of oneâs particular present, the past which, as I said in the Wordsworth book, gives back an echo when we call its nameâ (Levinson 2012, 357).
This sense of reciprocity between the Romantic past and the critical, as well as political, present was spelt out by Clifford Siskin in The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (1988). Like other critics associated with the new historicism, Siskin, too, is concerned with power. However, by utilising the work of Foucault rather than Marx, he focuses on the discursive practices through which humans produce knowledge, rather than on the ideological silences in texts. The consequence is a significantly different kind of project from that of McGann, Levinson, and other new historicists who had written on Wordsworth and others of the âbig sixâ. For Siskin, political critics such as McGann were still immersed in Romantic values insofar as their focus on the Romantic canon remained within the traditional parameters of the study of âLiteratureâ, a concept which itself had been formed in the Romantic era. Nevertheless, while the focus might have shifted to regimes of classification and technologies of perception, as crucial to the operations of power, Siskinâs aim is still to move âoutsideâ Romanticism, to distance his project from its assumptions and modes of thinking. As he remarks, the value of his project lies in its potential to set the stage âfor more work that, in examining the transition to the Romantic norm, will help to construct the next oneâ (Siskin 1988, 14).
Similar aims also characterised feminist approaches to Romanticism in the 1980s and 1990s, albeit in very different registers. Siskinâs anti-canonical argument was replicated, for example, in the recuperation of a wide range of women writers and...