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Romanticism and Periodisation: a Roundtable David Duff, Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Stafford, Martin Procházka, and Laurent Folliot

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Romanticism and Periodisation: a Roundtable David Duff, Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Stafford, Martin Procházka, and Laurent Folliot L Romanticism and Time EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON ANIEL -M Romanticism and Time This brilliantly conceived, exhilarating, and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential reading for all those interested in taking the long view of the historical, literary, and USITELLI philosophical times of British Romanticism. Literary Temporalities Pamela Clemitt, Queen Mary, University of London Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international AND EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the S United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the ABIRON “four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume ( produce, as Wordsworth might say, a “timely utterance.” EDS ) Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley This volume considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march R 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. Revising current thinking about periodisation, these essays survey the Romantic canon’s evolution over time and approach Romanticism as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the OMANTICISM publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover Image: J.M.W Turner, Ancient Italy - Ovid Banished from Rome (1838). Cover Design by Anna Ga� . AND T IME book eebook and OA edi� ons also available OPEN ACCESS OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron (eds), Romanticism and Time. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232#copyright. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0232#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. This book has been published with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France. Univ. Lille, ULR 4O74—CECILLE—Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-071-9 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-072-6 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-073-3 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-074-0 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-80064-075-7 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-80064-076-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0232 Cover Image: J.M.W Turner, Ancient Italy—Ovid Banished from Rome (1838). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turner_Ovid_Banished_from_Rome.jpg. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable David Duff, Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Stafford, Martin Procházka, and Laurent Folliot Taking the format of a closing roundtable discussion—with prepared statements followed by a formal response (Laurent Folliot) and an open-ended debate between the five contributors—this coda explores the issue of literary periodisation in Romanticism, starting from the Romantics’ own efforts at self-periodisation and the emergence of a new critical discourse on the ‘spirit of the age’ (David Duff, ‘Phases of British Romanticism’). It examines the terminology of periodisation, charting the history and shifting meaning of key terms, and the new awareness of historical beginnings and endings prompted by the French Revolution and other world-changing events (Nicholas Halmi, ‘Periodisation and the Epochal Event’). The difficulties of periodising a movement so diffuse in its origins and so differentiated in its national and regional manifestations are addressed, as is the impulse to find unifying characteristics amid the unprecedented cultural diversity of the period (Fiona Stafford, ‘Romanticism and the “Four Nations”: Not Quite in Time’). While the stress is on British Romanticism through its different historical phases and national traditions, the next contribution takes up a more cross-border approach by examining the relationship between British, European, and American Romanticism (Martin Procházka, ‘Periodisation as a Problem: The Case of American Romanticism’). In each case, questions of chronology are set alongside other theoretical and methodological problems, the aim being to arrive at tentative conclusions about the usefulness or otherwise of a concept of the ‘Romantic period’ or of potential subdivisions of it that could reflect the continuities and discontinuities of Romantic literature. © David Duff et al., CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.11 228 Romanticism and Time Introduction: Phases of British Romanticism David Duff Periodisation is an intellectual process intimately connected with Romantic thought, and the idea of a ‘Romantic period’ has its roots in the Romantics’ own reflections on time. Yet these are highly problematic concepts, which have been vigorously debated since the inception of the Romantic movement and still provoke controversy. Other contributors to this volume have touched on some of the issues we are about to raise but this roundtable discussion confronts them directly, from a range of different perspectives. We start with the Romantics’ efforts at self-periodisation and the emergence of a new literary discourse on the ‘spirit of the age’. We then examine the terminology of periodisation, charting the history and shifting meanings of key terms such as ‘period’, ‘epoch’, ‘age’, and connecting these semantic shifts with the new awareness of historical beginnings and endings prompted by the French Revolution and other world- changing events. Next, we address the difficulties of periodising a movement so diffuse in its origins and so differentiated in its national and regional manifestations, while also analysing the impulse—as pronounced among Romantic-era writers as among later literary historians—to find unifying characteristics amid the unprecedented cultural diversity of the period. The emphasis of our discussion is on British Romanticism—its different historical phases and national trajectories—but we also consider the relationship between British and European Romanticism, as well as the more problematic case of American Romanticism. At each stage, we set empirical questions of chronology alongside theoretical and methodological problems, the aim of the discussion being to explore the conceptual foundations of periodisation and to assess the usefulness or otherwise of the idea of a ‘Romantic period’, or potential subdivisions or extensions of it that can register the continuities and discontinuities of Romantic literature. After some introductory remarks, the roundtable will consist of three position statements followed by a prepared response and a final stage of open-ended, ad hoc discussion. Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable 229 To begin on a personal note, my awareness of the problem of periodisation was heightened by the experience of editing The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, in which the question took a very practical form: where chronologically to begin and end, what range of forward and backward reference to include, and what sort of diversity and unity to present under the title phrase ‘British Romanticism’.1 I took two key editorial decisions. The first was to foreground the different literary traditions of the ‘four nations’—England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales—and to show how they all contributed to the making of ‘British’ Romanticism. The aim was to trace both the cross-fertilisation and the tensions and rivalries between these traditions, and also to reflect on the significance of the key moment of constitutional change in this period, the Act of Union of 1800, which brought the four nations together to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland—but with many of those tensions and rivalries still intact. The Handbook has a dedicated ‘Region and Nation’ section with
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