Romantic Shades and Shadows

Susan J. Wolfson

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781421425559
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Haunting's consequences for the literary imagination.

Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading.

Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force.

Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Texts
• Abbreviations
• One. Setting the Stage: Apparitions of Writing
• Two. Shades of Will + Words + Worth: What’s in a Name?
• Three. Hazlitt’s Conjurings: First Acquaintance & “Quaint Allusion”
• Four. Shelley’s Phantoms of the Future in 1819
• Five. Me and My Shadows: Byron’s Company of Ghosts
• Six. Shades of Relay: Yeats’s Latent Keats / Keats’s Latent Yeats
• After Wording: Writing of Apparitions
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index