Notes Introduction 1. Robert Southey, “On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- says, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (1817; London: John Murray, 1832), II, 82. The identity of Junius remained a mystery, and even Edmund Burke was suspected. For an argument that he was Sir Philip Francis, see Alvar Ellegård, Who Was Junius? (The Hague, 1962). 2. Byron, “The Vision of Judgment” in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–92), VI, 309–45. 3. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Ro- mantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 13. 4. See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1980). 5. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 23–24. 6. Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 39. 7. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, p. 39. 8. McGann, “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 1–21 (13). 9. Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 209–25 (209). 10. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 12–13. 11. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Treatments of Romantic-period satire before this tend to be uneven and burdened with a lack of information on the primary texts, which often accompanies an assumption that there is no significant satire after Pope. Perhaps the clearest example is Thomas Lock- wood’s Post–Augustan Satire: Charles Churchill and Satirical Poetry, 1750–1800 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1979), 222 Satire and Romanticism which contains some useful information on poets and their works but whose bias is revealed in the admission that Lockwood views his study as “some- thing in the way of an autopsy” (p. 3). One recent helpful study is Claude Rawson’s Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1994). Rawson places his key terms in narrative sequence, “a patrician culture in decline” being reflected in the decline of satire and its displacement by sentimental modes (xi). As this implies, Rawson is inter- ested in strong canonical works, and accepts as given the opposition of satiric and sentimental modes it is my purpose to challenge. 12. The importance of Romantic-period parody, precisely defined, is also be- ginning to become apparent, beginning with a collection edited by David A. Kent and D. R. Ewen, Romantic Parodies 1797–1831 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), and culminating in the more complete anthology edited by Graeme Stones and John Strachan, Parodies of the Ro- mantic Age, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). 13. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 2. 14. For a summary of precisely how this shift in critical opinion was effected, see Upali Amarasinghe, Dryden and Pope in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Study of Changing Literary Taste, 1800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1962). 15. Joseph Warton, Essay on Pope, 2 vols. (London: 1756–82), I, 344; the im- portance of Warton’s judgments is discussed by Amarasinghe, esp. pp. 27–51. 16. David Perkins, “The Construction of ‘The Romantic Movement’ as a Liter- ary Classification,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (1990), 129–43. 17. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Trans- gression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 18. I take the example of the contextualized wink from Gilbert Ryle, as cited in Clifford Geertz’s “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Cul- ture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. 19. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to The Rape of the Lock first appeared in an 1896 edition (London: Leonard Smithers), which was reprinted by Dover Publications in 1968. 20. Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—and Others Don’t (New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1996). 21. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 511. For a useful sample of relevant applications of Bourdieu’s theory to literary studies, see the special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 58.4 (December 1997), especially articles by John Guillory, William Paulson, Trevor Ross, and Marilyn Butler. Notes 223 22. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: the Economic World Reversed,” Poetics 12 (1983), 311–56 (315). Chapter 1 1. Letter to Samuel Rogers, 29 September 1808, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 6 vols. (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1935–39; 1937), I, 243–45. 2. As Frank Whitehead puts it in George Crabbe: A Reappraisal (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995),”in 1807, in his fifty-third year, [Crabbe] launched into a new writ- ing career . .” (p. 15). 3. Robert L. Chamberlain, George Crabbe (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 102. 4. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825) in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34; 1932), XI, 164. 5. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On Discriminations of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39 (1924), 229–53; Jerome J. McGann, “Rethinking Romanticism,” ELH 59 (1992), 735–54; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 90–95; René Huchéns, George Crabbe and His Times 1754–1832 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907), p. 255. Some other notable treatments include that of Roger Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), who cuts through critical pieties in his assessment of Crabbe as an apologist for “officialdom,” a perspective I find helpful even if it sometimes verges on reductionism. One widespread twentieth-century reading of Crabbe is ex- pressed in an essay by L. J. Swingle, “Late Crabbe in Relation to the Augus- tans and Romantics: The Temporal Labyrinth of his Tales in Verse, 1812,” ELH 42 (1975), 580–94, which argues that late Crabbe, at least, looks more like modernism than either “Augustanism” or “Romanticism.” It may be that Crabbe’s Romantic-period satire is what looks to us more like mod- ernism than anything usually called “Romantic.” 6. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1973–82), V, 265 (15 September 1817). Those going the wrong way, according to Byron, included those now recognized as Ro- mantic: Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and Byron himself. 7. Leslie Stephen, Cornhill Magazine XXX (1874), 454–73, in Crabbe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Arthur Pollard (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 437–50 (447–48). Despite this opposition of Crabbe and Keats, Stephen means to preserve Crabbe’s reputation against the most “bigoted” Keatsians. Coventry Patmore compares Crabbe and Shelley in the St. James Gazette, 16 February 1887, in Pollard, pp. 465–67. 8. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l. 858, Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: 224 Satire and Romanticism Clarendon Press, 1980–92; 1980), I, 256; Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Ed- inburgh Review (November 1812), 277–305; (April 1810), 30–55. 9. Jerome J. McGann, “The Anachronism of George Crabbe,” in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 294–312 (p. 294). McGann anticipates some of my arguments, here, beginning with his assertion that the Romantic judg- ments against Crabbe were “part of a polemic on behalf of certain poetical criteria” (p. 295), and his recognition that Jeffrey’s critical response is “one of the most important local manifestations of the various cultural struggles which marked the entire period” (p. 295). I intend, however, to shift the emphasis to genre, and to take the differences between Crabbe and the Ro- mantics as the starting place for examining how those differences themselves get constructed in terms of genre and mode. 10. Edinburgh Review, July 1819, 118–48. 11. Fenwick note to “Lucy Gray,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49; 1940), I, 360. 12. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 511. The remark in this case is made in the context of Bourdieu’s recog- nition that sociological analysis of aesthetics is itself open to charges of “ter- roristic” leveling. On the contrary, he replies, it is the process of taste-making itself that exercises the truly terrorizing “symbolic violence” of exclusion and denigration. He goes on to cite modern French magazines as the best examples of such symbolic violence. It is intriguing to consider that it was late eighteenth-century “magazines” of a different sort, also aimed at what was then a new “middle-brow” audience, were one important venue for the kind of rural poetry both Wordsworth and Crabbe produced, in their different ways.