REVIEWING ROMANTICISM Also by Philip W. Martin

BYRON: A POET BEFORE IDS PUBUC MAD WOMEN IN ROMANTIC WRITING

Also by Robin Jarvis

WORDSWORTH, MILTON AND THE THEORY OF POETIC RELATIONS RevieW"ing Romanticism

Edited by Philip W. Martin Field Chair, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education and Robin Jarvis Lecturer in Literary Studies Bristol Polytechnic

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-21954-4 ISBN 978-1-349-21952-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21952-0

Editorial matter and selection © Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis 1992 Text © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1992

ISBN 978-0-312-06801-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reviewing romanticism / edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis. p. em. "Selection of papers given at a conference held at King Alfred's College, Winchester in Apri11989" -Pref. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-06801-1 1. English literature-19th century-History and criticism­ Congresses. 2. English literature-18th century-History and criticism-Congresses. 3. Romanticism-Great Britain-Congresses. I. Martin, Philip W. II. Jarvis, Robin, 1956- PR457.R455 1992 820.9'145-dc20 91-24828 CIP Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction xii Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis

1 A Modern Electra: Matricide and the Writings of 1 Mary and Charles Lamb Jane Aaron

2 Editing the Waverley Novels 14 J. H. Alexander and Peter Garside

3 Reviewing Romanticism: The Sea and the Book 32 Bernard Beatty

4 Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity 51 Fred Botting

5 Mary Shelley: Immortality, Gender and the 60 Rosy Cross Marie Roberts

6 The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s 69 E. J. Clery

7 Peter Wilkins: A Romantic Cult Book 86 Nora Crook

8 Literature and Feeling: New Directions in the 99 Theory of Romanticism Kelvin Everest

v vi Contents

9 Opium and the Imperial Imagination 116 Josephine McDonagh

10 Romantic Subjects: Shaping the Self from 134 1789 to 1989 Vincent Newey

11 Pierce Egan and the Representation of London 154 Roger Sales

12 Preparations for Happiness: Mary Wollstonecraft 170 and Imagination John Whale

Index 190 Preface

The contents of this volume are a selection of papers given at a conference held at King Alfred's College, Winchester in April 1989. The conference was set up by the editors in the hope that it would be the first of a regular series of conferences for British scholars work­ ing in the field of Romanticism. It was also proposed that such a project would be well served by the establishment of an association acting as a network for individual scholars and for those extant societies devoted to the study of individual Romantic writers. Accordingly, the British Association for Romantic Studies was founded at the conference, and is now well-supported by a growing membership. The proceedings offered here are a representative sample of those given under the broad conference title, 'Reviewing Romanticism'. In multiple ways they demonstrate that the received idea of there being six major authors whose works constitute the body of English Romantic writing is barely credible. The current review of Roman­ ticism is being conducted largely in regions deemed non-canonical in the terms of the old orthodoxy. Romanticism's story about itself was essentially one about genius, frustrated or nurtured. Neces­ sarily, distinctions, whether of kind or of degree, operated to secure the exclusivity on which the concept of genius rested whenever this story was told. Such distinctions are now broken down, and Roman­ ticism is being recognised as a wider base of cultural activity un­ confined by genre, gender, class, rhetoric or style.

vii Acknowledgements

Thanks are due first to our contributors for their patience and re­ sponsiveness at the editing stage. We would also like to record our gratitude to those who contributed to the wider project to which these papers belong: to all those who came to the conference, and to those who helped in its organisation. Ms Marian Read gave tirelessly of her time and organisational skills. We would also like to thank the governing body of King Alfred's College, and the Vice-Principal, Dr Tim Drey, for his support, and the publishers' copy-editor for all his hard work. The publishers and editors are grateful to John Heath-Stubbs for permission to reproduce his translation of L'Infinito by Giancomo Leopardi.

viii Notes on the Contributors

Jane Aaron is a Lecturer in English at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she teaches courses on Romanticism, women's writing and feminist theory. Her book, A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb, is forthcoming. She is currently working on a more general study of gender and Romanticism.

J. H. Alexander is a Senior Lecturer in English at Aberdeen Univer­ sity. His publications include Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing (1976), 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel': Three Essays (1978), The Reception of Scott's Poetry by his Correspondents: 1796-1817 (1979), 'Marmion': Studies in Interpretation and Composition (1981), and Reading Wordsworth (1987). He is editor of the Scott Newsletter and an executive editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, for which he has edited Kenilworth and will be editing Tales of My Landlord: Third Series.

Bernard Beatty is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Liverpool University. He is the Academic Editor of The Byron Journal and Chairman of English Association Work. His publications include Byron's 'Don Juan' (1985), Byron's 'Don Juan' and other Poems and Byron and the Limits of Fiction (1988, as joint editor with Vincent Newey). He is now writing a book on Romanticism called Spilt Religion.

Fred Botting is a Fellow at the School of English, University of Wales, Cardiff, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Frankenstein, criticism and theory.

Emma Clery teaches part-time at the University of Sussex. She is currently completing a study of representations of the supernatural in eighteenth-century England.

Nora Crook, Jamaican by birth and schooling, is a Senior Lecturer in English, Anglia Higher Education College at Cambridge. She is the author of Shelley's Venomed Melody (with Derek Guiton) and of

ix x Notes on the Contributors Kipling's Myths of Love and Death (1990). She is currently editing one of Shelley's Bodleian notebooks.

Kelvin Everest is author of Coleridge's Secret Ministry (1979) and editor of Shelley Revalued (1983). His recent publications include English Romantic Poetry (1990). He is currently editing the Complete Poems of Shelley: Volume 1 of this edition was published in 1989. He has taught at St David's University College, Lampeter, and the Uni­ versity of Leicester. He is now A. C. Bradley Professor of Modem Literature at the University of Liverpool.

Peter Garside teaches at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and is an executive editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. He is one of the editors of an Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism (1990) and is currently completing new editions of Scott's The Black Dwarf and Guy Mannering.

Robin Jarvis is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Bristol Poly­ technic. He is author of Wordsworth, Milton and the Theory of Poetic Relations (1991) and of numerous articles in scholarly journals.

Philip W. Martin has taught English at the University of Exeter and King Alfred's College, Winchester. He is now Principal Lecturer in English at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Educa­ tion. He is author of Byron: A Poet before his Public (1982) and Mad Women in Romantic Writing (1987), and is currently working on a reader's guide to Romantic poetry. He is joint British editor of the journal Literature & History, and joint editor of the Bulletin of the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Josephine McDonagh is a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at Exeter University. She is the author of a forth­ coming book, De Quincey's Disciplines.

Vincent Newey is Professor of English at the University of Leicester. His publications include Cowper's Poetry: a Critical Study and Re­ assessment (1982), Byron and the Limits of Fiction (1988, as joint editor with B. G. Beatty) and a range of articles on Romantic poetry. His other main research interests are in Puritan literature, the Victorian novel and metaphorics. He is one of the editors of The Byron Journal Notes on the Contributors xi and joint editor of The Bulletin of the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Marie Roberts is the author of British Poets and Secret Societies (1986) and Gothic Immortals: the Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1990), and editor of Explorations in Medicine (1987). She is currently an editor for Studies in Hermeticism: Cauda Pavonis, and she lectures in literary studies at Bristol Polytechnic.

Roger Sales is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of East Anglia. His publications on Romanticism include English Literature in History, 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics (1983) and articles on pas­ toral poetry. He has also written books on Marlowe, Shakespeare and Stoppard. He is currently writing a book called Topical Austen.

John Whale is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He is author of Thomas De Quincey's Reluctant Autobiography (1984) and a number of articles on De Quincey, Hazlitt, Paine and Burke. He is currently completing a study of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the Romantic period entitled Imagination Under Pres­ sure, and is editing, with Stephen Copley, a collection of essays which reassesses the literature of the Romantic period. Introduction PHILIP MARTIN and ROBIN JARVIS

When it was decided to hold a conference in Winchester in 1989 under the title 'Reviewing Romanticism', the organisers foresaw the participants debating the varied reverberations in Romantic studies of the long theoretical shock-wave of the past twenty-five years or so, and the more recent pronounced historical turn which the discip­ line had taken in the years leading up to the (possibly coincidental) bicentenary of the French Revolution. They also solicited scholars' reflections on the present place and function of Romantic Studies in a specifically British cultural context, given that many of the major developments affecting Romantic criticism had originated on the other side of the Atlantic. While it is probably fair to say that these objectives were all to some extent fulfilled, the lines of argument we have described, and their interrelations, were far from predict­ able. As a consequence, the organisers had to review their own notions of the ways in which Romanticism was currently being reviewed. The representativeness of both papers and discussion as a sample of British Romantic criticism is of course open to question, and a totalising summary of the proceedings is neither practicable nor desirable; but several points are worth making by way of introduction.

The first is to question the notion of the subject itself. To attribute a title is to assume a certainty of knowing, so: what is the given that is under review here? Romanticism as we still know it has been largely constituted by a lengthy and cumulative series of aesthetic evaluative practices. The paradox of this constitution is immediately evident: how is it that aesthetics can construct a notion of period, primarily a historically conceived subject? The only way around this impasse is by deferring to Zeitgeist theory, a broadly Hegelian view of history that reads its cultural production as indicative in specific or analogical ways of its social and economic condition. Such a view is now largely discredited in the academy, and so it is perhaps, that

xii Introduction xiii period study itself, and the canonising that goes with it, is the site of so much contemporary anxiety. The evaluative practices that have created our current (but inherently outmoded and perhaps therefore decadent) Romanticism have been concerned to attribute a human­ istic rank-ordering to a number of writers producing mostly poetry between the dates 1789 and 1830. Further, those writers have been ordered or gathered together around certain essential concepts (imagination, liberty, organicism, individualism or subjectivity) which until relatively recently have remained unproblematised although, of course, subject to continuous archival and expository examina­ tion. The extent to which each writer may be made to absorb or exemplify these essential concepts determines their Romantic pedi­ gree: thus no one will question that Wordsworth was a Romantic, but some will deliberate over Byron's right to carry a card. As for Mrs Radcliffe or Mary Lamb, they might be consigned to wait in the queue for those whose cases are periodically up for review: George Crabbe, John Clare, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore. Weare all familiar with this difficulty of selection, easily dis­ tended into agonising, and it is an act of facility to take on an imagined orthodoxy and parade its iniquitous invisible judgements in an appalled and righteous spirit. Even more appalling for most of us, given the established habits of our reading, however, is the prospect of vacations spent reading Gebir, Jacqueline, The Fudge Family in Paris or the like, and so despite the conscientious discus­ sions and sad headshaking over the commercial demands of the academic publishing houses, the participants of such deliberations usually follow them by retiring to a place of privacy for the purpose of preparing next term's course on Songs of Innocence and of Experi­ ence, The Prelude, Prometheus Unbound, the Odes, etc. Yet at the same time it can be said that the push for change is now being concerted with more regularity and from more sources than before. Much recent criticism, not solely in Romantic studies, has been structured by a figure of liminality, the kind that produces titles or intellectual orientations in the 'Towards ... ' or 'Beyond ...' mould; and this has been no less true of the selections of texts that have provided the vehicular form for this self-paralysing critical brink­ manship. Criticism has been perpetually on the point of opening up new areas as well as kinds of enquiry, always about to destroy the canon while continuing to work its mischief through it. At Winches­ ter, however, the mould seemed finally to have broken, with the xiv Introduction pieces nowhere in sight. Wordsworth and Coleridge, most glaringly, barely featured at all among the conference papers, their places being taken by a variety of colourful yet marginal figures from the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary periods: some undeniably obscure, like Robert Paltock and Pierce Egan, others well-known but shifting rather uneasily in the limelight, like Mary W ollstonecraft. The backroom boys and girls of Romanticism were centre-stage. While none of us were looking, Gothic fiction, preeminently Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (to which a crowded symposium was devoted), had clearly moved from the margins to the centre of the Romantic canon, on the crest of a wave of a major transvaluation of popular literature. Wordsworth, it seemed, had finally lost his battle against what he branded the 'gross and violent stimulants' of the literary marketplace. The programme of the contributors to this volume though, is to contest the assumed inferiority of the popular, and its equation with the cynical manipulation of a passive and benighted readership, either by revealing subtle and contradictory messages beneath the lurid surfaces of the text; or by highlighting the sub­ versive potential of literary forms that communicate in positive, non-hierarchising ways with the repressed terms of the dominant culture; or by interrogating more closely the power relations active within an institution which is required to define and defend its boundaries by unstable acts of exclusion of a popular 'other'. One question that surfaces immediately, therefore, is whether the expanding universe of Romantic texts can be assimilated to the available conceptual models of Romanticism, or whether the pop­ ular literature of the period has to be placed in necessary opposition to the Romantic movement as traditionally constructed and con­ ceived. Of course, there has never been agreement as to whether Romanticism existed as a coherent body of thought and feeling, and, if so, in exactly what the latter consisted; and we are comfortable with the notion of Romanticism as a post-Romantic construction. But arguments for and against 'Romanticism' still tend to concentrate on the same narrow band of writers and texts. The most thoroughgoing recent empirical history of the period, Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, derides the facile equation of Romanticism with revolution on the part of post-Romantic social non-conformists eager to find ancestral culture-heroes, and denigrates philosophical critics for their perpetuation, through a partial reading of the canon, of an ideological view of art as 'irrational and introverted'. Butler all but dismembers Romanticism into a congeries of overlapping socio- Introduction xv cultural trends or phases, confusingly designated by terms from art history (Neoclassicism), politics (counter-revolution) and psycho­ logy (introversion). She concludes that "'Romanticism" is inchoate because it is not a single intellectual movement but a complex of responses to certain conditions which Western society has ex­ perienced and continues to experience.' Even her impressively encyclopaedic approach, however, gives remarkably scant attention to popular literature, with battalions of prolific but neglected writers jostling for a few lines' elbow-room around platforms still securely occupied by the canonical figures. The feeling conveyed by many of the contributors to the Winchester conference was that the high ground cannot be thus occupied for much longer, because the pres­ sure 'from below' is becoming too great. The academic apartheid which has seen Gothic fiction, sentimental writing, the Jacobin novel, even the periodical essay and other popular forms relegated to the townships and studied in discreet isolation, while the six male poets luxuriate in the laagers provided by university syllabuses up and down the country, is in danger of breaking down as Romanticism calls more and more to be reconceptualised on an intergeneric and interdiscursive basis. Butler's empiricism precludes consideration of whether Roman­ ticism is less an intellectual movement or set of conscious responses to social and political upheavals than a configuration of discourse, a paradigm shift; whether, in that event, it might also identify a recur­ ring critical orientation; and whether, in either event, popular and other 'minor' writing can be uncomplainingly absorbed into the resulting histories of official discourse, or whether such writing must be posited as the latter's non- or anti-ideological other. It is the recognition of at least some of these possibilities that has produced one of the most remarkable spectacles in recent Romantic criticism: the seemingly limitless chain of demystification via which a proces­ sion of critics repetitively pillory their predecessors for failing to escape from Romantic patterns of thought. Thus Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology, accuses M. H. Abrams of reifying key Roman­ tic concepts such as 'spirituality' and 'creativity' in the service of a desanctified Protestant meliorism, and of ratifying 'an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations' on the part of the academy. David Simpson then reproves McGann for collaborat­ ing too readily with Wordsworth's Romantic strategy of displace­ ment from the historical to the spiritual, and therefore furtively resubscribing to the consolatory message regarding poetry's tran- xvi Introduction scendental objectives which McGann efficiently harpooned in earlier critics. More recently, Clifford Siskin includes Simpson in a sweep­ ing exposure of 'the Romantic nature of criticism written about the Romantics', bracketing him with McGann and others for their various efforts to articulate a purely rhetorical theory of Roman­ ticism that always ends up fetishising a creative process whose psychologised complexities remain one of the unexploded myths of Romantic discourse. One waits with somewhat less than bated breath for someone to impugn Siskin in turn for unwitting complicity with this same discourse - possibly, one suspects, on the grounds that he mystifies the historical agency responsible for the 'changing inter­ relations of social and literary forms' which he analyses. Nevertheless, Siskin's enterprise is significant not only for its willingness to work interdiscursively - moving into areas like polit­ ical economy, demography and medicine - to help specify the 'norm change' held to distinguish Romanticism, but also for its welcome miscegenation of poetry and prose, canonical and popular texts, which makes it one of the first books genuinely to overcome the threshold mentality that has gripped Romantic studies for so long. Whether Siskin's ecumenical embrace of 'high and 'low' within the single grand Romantic trope of the developmental self proves ad­ equate to our sense of a more variegated and democratised field of texts will be tested by such investigations as are undertaken by many of the contributors in this volume, so singularly uninhibited by the orthodox canon which most, as teachers, are still engaged to some extent in transmitting. Siskin's work also incorporates something of the intense self­ consciousness of the new historicism. He is particularly good at watching himself in the act of writing, wryly noting the coincidences between his own rhetorical patterns and those rehearsed in the texts he studies. This kind of awareness perhaps is one way out of the symbiotic double-bind between Romanticism and its critics, but it introduces a level of problematising generally inimical to the empir­ ical methods which have dominated British schools of criticism. Those working within the procedures or revised procedures of tradi­ tional scholarship and historical enquiry are frequently impatient of newly-problematised versions of historical cognition. For them an accumulative and objectively realisable history is an essential and secure context for a more knowing version of the text, which may emerge brimming with topical allusions lost to a purely hermeneutic approach. The history thus conceived is a process of endless sedi- Introduction xvii mentation, and its desedimentation (Spivak's word, for which deconstruction is an alternative in her translation of Of Grammatology) - the breakdown or questioning of its accumulative programme, the enquiring into its selective or narrative process - is unwelcome. The new historicism has been much contemplated recently, and like all neologisms, its spectacular rise has been succeeded by scep­ ticism and a disputation of its legitimacy. In Romantic studies its entrance was marked by conservative hoots of disapproval, particu­ larly from the Wordsworth lobby, and more recently its habit of Pyrrhonian self-inspection has led its own proponents and pro­ genitors to doubt the coherence of its early attempts to locate textual meanings. A post-modernist distrust of totality has infected the new historicist project with a pessimistic denial of its better knowledge and a capitulation to the demands of discourse as repetition and pastiche. Thus it is difficult to find a new historicist; the label is more frequently denied than accepted. Yet who can deny that its impact was considerable and its effects most salutary? The question of context and literature's relation to history are now deeply and productively problematised, and texts are no longer so easily provided with a 'background' (the implicit hierarchy is now exposed) and neither are they absorbed into that mysterious monolith of 'history'. Given our new difficulties, and what seems to us to be the immense amount of confusion surround­ ing what new historicism is or was (since it is gone in the moment of its apprehension) a few explicatory words here will not be out of place. The new historicism as a movement is most securely located in a body of scholarly work in the Renaissance by authors such as Greenblatt and Goldberg and its procedures can be observed in the journal Representations. Its entry into Romantic studies was marked by Marjorie Levinson's book on Wordsworth, which appeared to some to be a fulmination, but in fact had its precedents in the work of cultural materialists on the one hand (particularly John Barrell) and McGann's Romantic Ideology on the other, this latter text having raised important questions about the situation of the Romantic critic and the sources of that critic's discourse and terminology. Taking stock of these developments, Levinson clearly saw how they could be put together by adopting an approach similar to that used by the Renaissance new historicists, who (broadly speaking) were in the process of taking Marx out of Marxism, replacing the classical models of social conflict with Foucauldian paradigms of power rela- xviii Introduction tions. At the same time, the methods of this new critical enquiry derived from cultural anthropology, in particular, from the work of Clifford Geertz. The most relevant aspect of Geertz's work was the notion of 'thick description', essentially a mode of describing that develops from a deep questioning of the anthropological act of seeing. Geertz claimed that ethnographic observation was frequently an interpretative ac­ tivity not unlike literary criticism, and that the 'truth' or meaning of the acts observed (utterances, rituals, performatives of any kind) were fully permeated by networks of codes and signs dependent on contexts for their communicative efficacy, and further that the re­ construction of these encoded performatives by ethnographers was also likely to be encoded by the elements of interpretative activity which derived from their own culture. It is not just a matter of being aware of ethnocentricity, but a question of recognising that all inter­ pretative acts are representations; more exactly, representations of other people's representations of their worlds to themselves. Geertz's methods therefore provided new historicism with an analytical model that was highly self-conscious of the complexity of the representa­ tive or communicative act, and equally vexed by the question of the positions and discourses inherited by the ethnographer/interpreter. Once the anthropological model is transferred out of that discipline into that of literary history, however, something else happens, and that is the disruption of all models of historical linearity or homo­ geneity. The historian might now occupy a position wherein s/he looks at culture not from within a developing tradition, not from a point that has a cultural continuity, a sameness of a kind with that which is being observed, but from a point of dislocation. The connec­ tion with the past is severed: one now looks upon it as a stranger, not as a survivor or a descendant. This model of observation, not novel or remarkably original in its axioms as here described, by any means, breaks up the concept of cultural identity across history just as surely as it breaks up other elements of historical practice that at the time of new historicism's inauguration were under threat from other intellectual schools of thought, elements such as teleology, or the assembly of the archive into unselfconscious narratives of causal relations or progression. New historicism is thus able to make ready pacts with the challenges to Marxist teleology, with Foucault's de­ nial of totalising or sequentially interconnecting models of cultural change, with semiotics and the semiological historians such as Hayden White who were asking whole series of awkward questions about Introduction xix the writing of history itself. It is hard to say where genealogy ends and other forms of influences or even coincidences begin, and no doubt that rests with individual practice, but these seem to be the intellectual affiliations of new historicist work. It has been difficult, nevertheless, to distinguish between this new historicism and what some might call the old in the shape of cultural materialism. Whereas Renaissance new historicism was able to jus­ tify its epithet by contradistinctive reference to the work of E. M. W. Tillyard and all its pervasive influence, Romantic new historicism did not locate a foil of such clarity. Indeed, Marjorie Levinson's work seemed to progress out of an old historicist tradition (the work of E. P. Thompson and D. V. Erdman) rather than in opposition to it. Essentially, the project was to restore texts to history by way of reading their absences, by concentrating on aporia, repressions, or moments of textual stress. The text as a tenuous metamorphosing version of history was thus created anew, yet such critical practice was not ultimately distinct from the way John Barrell had described (for example) the relation between landscape painting and the rural poor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or indeed, more generally, the way Raymond Williams had theorised cultural relations and formations. To pause over new historicism's achievements draws us into the wider question of the place of theory in current Romantic criticism, particularly in Britain. In the mid-eighties it had seemed impossible to recompose Romanticism as it had once been known. Literary theory challenged our assembled meanings and wrenched into our shocked consciousness the hitherto repressed detail of the primal Romantic scene. In the vision of individual creativity, imagination and genius which constituted the self-determining subject, we saw the nightmare spectre: the incubus of a predetermined linguistic system, an already-read text, squatting hideously and impudently upon the body of our mother. Subject to our curious and traumatised gaze, she lay sexualised and supine, the immaculate conception of her poetry gone forever. Perhaps it is possible to repress what has been seen, to return to an anxiously reconstituted former world, although few have done this. Equally few perhaps, have allowed this new vision of Romanticism to prefigure all Romantic acts: the newly-eroticised version of Romantic conception, with all its jouissance of linguistic play, has turned out for them to be only foreplay, a process of eternal postponement, and as such, only the re­ enactment of a favourite Romantic trope or method. xx Introduction So it was that at Winchester we witnessed a widespread (but not unanimous) retreat, nervous or defiant, from many of the theoretical projects of the eighties. Unexpectedly, after all the bracing talk of a 'crisis in English' brought on by over-indulgence in theory, and on the heels of the frenzied reading of text after text in accordance with deeply problematised models of language and subjectivity, we seemed to have slumped into a kind of post-theoretical depression. Perhaps this was less true of some of the papers than it was of the debate accompanying them (which obviously cannot be reproduced here) for which the agenda was decisively set by Kelvin Everest's provocative contribution. It seemed nevertheless that theory had become infected with the malodour of a decade of Thatcherism, and was somehow at odds with the moral, social and political responsi­ bility now exacted of the critic. Those who still leant towards the wilder side of deconstruction were implicitly stigmatised as playing a disreputable double-game, kowtowing beneath a colourful display of resistance like those who pay their poll tax entirely in penny coins; the real heroes were those who showed their political seriousness by burning their Derridas and Lacans in the street. It seemed difficult to believe that only six years had passed since the publication of Romanticism and Language, that very representative anthology from a period of naked post-structuralist hubris. In the face of its editor's unconvincing claim that his contributors did not 'adhere to the same theoretical or methodological assumptions', there was a consistent and distinctive bias to the essays in the volume, and Arden Reed himself recognised, and saw as characteristic of contem­ porary Romantic criticism, a shared concern with rhetoricity over mimesis, multivalency over univocal meaning, and wild surmise over interpretative closure. Such interests seem to have faded into the early eighties along with the Limehouse Declaration and the Sinclair CS, and now appear to be profoundly suspicious to British scholars of the period: a deep distress has humanised our souls, and the new control we have submitted to is that of the historicity of the text or of textual meaning. Thus where the contributors to the present volume do show the influence of, for example, deconstruction, as in the fine essays by Fred Botting and Josephine McDonagh, it is care­ fully invigilated by a historical sense: supplementarity is not insisted upon as a disembodied anti-truth of the possibility of linguistic meaning, but as a brisure between aesthetics and history, in the context of material issues of addiction and of the relationship between colonising and colonised power in Britain's transactions Introduction xxi with China; and whereas images of disfigurement were once fastened upon as the self-troping, the linguistic moment par excel­ lence of Romantic poetry, indicative of the non-self-identity of mean­ ing and interpretation, it is monstrosity as a politically-encoded phenomenon, as an incipient challenge to the authoritarian discourses that necessarily produce it, that now engrosses the critic's attention. But was it ever thus? The question again arises about the specifi­ cally British character of Romantic studies, and of the domestic reception of Continental critical theories. Reed's contributors were all North American, and it is possible that British academics have never participated significantly in the American adventure in rhet­ orical criticism, or in other forms of theoretical criticism lacking a historical sense (such as many versions of psychoanalytical criti­ cism). Such is the case advanced more generally by Antony Easthope in his British Post-Structuralism, which argues that the 'French ideas' which comprise the theoretical matrix of post-structuralism received hospitality across the Channel only insofar as they could be put to work by the 'parent discourse' of Marxism ('foster-parent' would better embody Easthope's meaning), and that a preoccupation with the Althusserian-Lacanian critique of the subject as constituted rather than constitutive preserved the historical and political edge of the textual approaches that came into practice. Easthope contrasts this situation favourably with that of American deconstruction, stem­ ming from Paul de Man's reading of Derrida, in which everything reduces to the inescapable antinomies of individual acts of reading. Easthope's historiography might be queried for its selectivity and tendentiousness as much as for its appropriateness to the critical activity carried on in more specialist fields over the period he exam­ ines. Certainly there is much in British Romantic studies to embar­ rass such a statement as that 'deconstruction as such has made almost no impression on British post-structuralism'; the output of such critics as Isobel Armstrong, Stephen Bygrave, Angela Leighton and (the earlier) David Simpson, the project of The Oxford Literary Review (with its keen attention to the Romantic period) and the 'Theory and Text' conferences which it sponsored at Southampton, and the work of a whole generation of postgraduates and scholars which has yet only fitfully seen the light of day, would all suggest otherwise. And although Easthope would probably wish it were not so, excited discussions of de Man's Allegories of Reading co-existed cheerfully with active support of the miners' strike, theoretical and political interests displaying a kind of relative autonomy of which xxii Introduction this Althusserian would seem to disapprove. Nevertheless, his ob­ servation that at some time in the 1980s 'the moment of theory came to an end' chimes with our own perceptions, though we might put this moment rather later: it is assuredly the case, in Romantic studies as elsewhere, that, as the eighties ground on, 'the intellectual excite­ ment of the previous decade and its associated theoreticism came to an end as attention, concentrated in part by the ascendance of the right, turned to working through theory in application'. But whether, 6y the end of the eighties( the demise of a certain pure theoreticism has issued, for Romantic studies, in a more 'worldly' and politically­ mindful critical practice that brings a newly empowered high-tech apparatus to bear on the Romantic prehistory of contemporary culture, or alternatively a precipitate drive to reinstate humanistic values in a kind of neo-Leavisite recoil against the moral barbarism of the Thatcher years, it is perhaps too early to assess. Yet this decade or more of change has not only been impelled by literary theory. The historiographical dimension of literary criticism has challenged the canon by questioning the precedents and grounds for taste, and by demonstrating something of the historical processes which have determined matters of preference and decided the cur­ rency on which evaluations have been made. Its insights have con­ tributed to a material history of textuality itself, and we are now more conscious, as theorists or historicists, of how textual meanings inhere in the social and historical moments (from 1789 to 1989) producing those meanings. This material history of texts has also been compiled by those working as editors and biographers, as they accumulate the archives whose readings permit us to see the multi­ ple sources of textual origins and equally, therefore, the multiple versions of textual meaning. If the idea of the immanently meaning­ ful text is dead, it is not simply because Derrida and de Man have told us so. The contributors to this volume do not represent a specific school of criticism, new historicist, post-structuralist, materialist or other­ wise, and neither do they work within a shared methodology. Yet they are all responsive to the large shifts in perspective that have allowed us in recent years to begin to assemble new shapes for Romanticism. No longer do its discourses configure tidily around the same cluster of major works, and no longer is Romantic dis­ course bound to be characterised by its established values of subjec­ tivity, growth and development, feeling, organicism. Just so then, this unsettling has allowed us to recognise Romanticism from new Introduction xxiii and perhaps interestingly slanted angles, and see its composition less definitively in terms of different textual formations. Thus it is that here in this volume a number of contributors will not recognise the old Romantic hierarchies of primary and secondary authors and texts. Romanticism might now comprise not levels of texts but rela­ tions between them, not text and context merely, but constructions of the circulation of discourse and all its cultural richness and complexity. It is as if somehow the bicentenary of the French Revolution has coincided with a more general reconsideration of cultural relations, so that we are now no longer so ready to identify a specificity of Romanticism with a series of historical coordinates or even a body of shared aesthetic values. The old collocation of Romanticism was necessarily a process of exclusion, and during the bicentenary we have been made more aware of how collocations operate. What we wanted to see perhaps in 1989 was a series of newly-forged links between what we knew as Romanticism and the French Revolution, but in looking for these we were forced to scrutinise and puzzle over what was effectively a symbiotic relation between the two phenom­ ena: certain elements of Romanticism might be made to conspire with certain elements of the Revolution to produce a vague idea of historical continuity, of cultural homogeneity. How to select, of course, was the problem. Could it be that a revolutionary version of Romanticism would call into being a new pantheon, constituted by an examination of the closeness of given texts to the revolution debate? The scholarly activity of recent years, culminating in 1989, had made that a distinct possibility. Yet to read such a version of Romanticism might face one with an odd paradox, to study texts in supplementary relation to one grand historical event of which they were in some way involved or even reflective, and to select them accordingly, is at the same time to deny that supplementary relation, and to give primacy to that which follows. The revolution here is some kind of primum mobile which has its precedence usurped, even though it permeates the discourses which follow in mysterious ways. This kind of construction used to be operative in the version of Romanticism which set it up as a victory of creativity over and above political action or even political dis­ illusion, and most often this narrative was rehearsed in the develop­ mental tale of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But 'development' (a favourite Romantic theme in itself as Clifford Siskin has recently pointed out) may not be the burning issue. We are less interested in xxiv Introduction tracing causal linear patterns, in teleologies, in arguments which strain to show how one use of language is better than the one which preceded it, and we are less convinced by models which relegate history to a background status which is somehow vital and at the same time irrelevant in its detail. The work of Marilyn Butler and others has exposed the weakness of such models. To this end, materialist critics and new historicists alike have shunned simplistic tales of history and literature, and have worked instead with the relations of discourse and reading formations. Our contributors are of this moment too. In the main they show little compulsion to discuss canonical texts or writers - preferring to look at neglected representations of material life, as in Roger Sales's essay, or ideas central to the Romantic construction of itself, as in the essays by Emma Clery and John Whale. Others have opened up new areas for the siting of Romantic discourse or suggested alternative ways of reading texts to those which make up the current orthodoxy. Ultimately our review of Romanticism suggests the multiplicity of ways of reading. The further we proceed from Romanticism as a monolith, the more sensible we become of our role in the construction of its bricolage. To say as much is not just to offer testimony to the rich variety of the culture we study, but to emphasise the urgency of our intellectual fascination with it.