The Poetics Of Decline In British Romanticism

Offers fresh understanding of British Romanticism by exploring how anxieties about decline impacted debates about literature's form and meaning.

Unlike the first two volumes of "ANGLES" on the English-Speaking World, this special issue does not originate in a set of conference papers. The idea of compiling a collection of essays on Romanticism emerged from the unusually strong concentration on Romantic studies among the graduate students of the English Department a couple of years ago. This volume places their work in the context of distinguished international scholars of greater seniority, scholars who have become academic contacts through conferences and assessment committees, and whose contributions I am very pleased to be able to include alongside the works of local contributors. The Romantic generations of the title of this volume thus strike a number of different chords: generations of scholars in Romantic studies; conventional divisions of Romantic poets into first, second and possibly third generations; the self-generative aspect of Romanticism; the awareness of poetic reputation and the image and afterlife of the poet. The collection spans just over a hundred years, from the 1780s to the 1890s, and while not in any way attempting to define Romanticism or raise issues of periodization the volume allows for the continued existence of Romantic features right until the end of the nineteenth century. Poetry looms large in this issue of ANGLES; apart from Ian Duncan's essay on Hume, Scott, and the "Rise of Fiction",' all the other essays are in some way concerned with the Romantic poet and his poetry. The Romantic poet is thus represented as a collector and editor of ballads, as a political radical and printmaker, as other to himself, essentially ignorant of the process of poetic composition, as a rival and collaborator with other poets, or as a poet long dead, the subject of successive generations of poetic lament. The boundaries between poetry and the visual arts is explored in a couple of the essays; indeed, the rivalry between portraiture and literature pervades no less than three of the contributions, and no matter whether the subject of inquiry is the image of the poet or the image of the poet's mother, the Romantic poet displays a high degree of self-consciousness with respect to both literary and visual media. Romantic generations generate both selves and others in poetry and portraiture.

Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Calling into question that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that the Romantic poets, far from being indifferent or hostile to popular forms of literature were actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit ideological value. Whether in their proccupation with fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to suit their own democratic, secular and skeptical ethos--a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for—or commanding—attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.

What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about progress and perfection? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement--increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury--they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley's plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The majestic edifices of Wordsworth's imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are republican or pious, not to mention the recalcitrant enthusiast who is the poet himself.

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts. Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett. Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.