Newman - Global Romanticism

Global

Romanticism

Transits

Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Series Editors

Greg Clingham

Bucknell University

Kate Parker

University of WisconsinLa Crosse

Transits is the next horizon. The series of books, essays, and monographs aims to extend recent achievements in eighteenth-century studies and to publish work on any aspects of the literature, thought, and culture of the years 16501850. Without ideological or methodological restrictions, Transits seeks to provide transformative readings of the literary, cultural, and historical interconnections between Britain, Europe, the Far East, Oceania, and the Americas in the long eighteenth century, and as they extend down to present time. In addition to literature and history, such global perspectives might entail considerations of time, space, nature, economics, politics, environment, and material culture, and might necessitate the development of new modes of critical imagination, which we welcome. But the series does not thereby repudiate the local and the national for original new work on particular writers and readers in particular places in time continues to be the bedrock of the discipline.

Selected titles in the Series

The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Womens Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction

Jennifer Golightly

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Yal Schlick

John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society

Regina Hewitt

Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals

Manushag N. Powell

Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 16601760

Kathleen Lubey

The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 17901814: The Struggle for Historys Authority

Morgan Rooney

Rococo Fiction in France, 16001715: Seditious Frivolity

Allison Stedman

Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets

Deborah Kennedy

Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context

Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print

Kevin Murphy and Sally ODriscoll

Developments in the Histories of Sexualities

Chris Mounsey

Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith

Michael Griffin

Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-first Century: By Succession of Delight

Edited by Min Wild and Noel Chevalier

Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, 18001830: Romantic Crises

Benjamin Kim

Print Technology in Scotland and America 17401800

Louis Kirk McAuley

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century

Chris Mounsey

Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 16601690

Brandon Chua

Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 17601820

Edited by Evan Gottlieb

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit http://www.bucknell.edu/universitypress

Transits

Global

Romanticism

Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 17601820

Edited by Evan Gottlieb

LEWISBURG
BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by Bucknell University Press

Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield for edited collections

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Global romanticism : origins, orientations, and engagements, 1760-1820 / edited by Evan Gottlieb.

pages cm. (Transits: literature, thought & culture, 1650-1850)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61148-625-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61148-626-1 (electronic) 1. Romanticism. 2. Globalization in literature. I. Gottlieb, Evan, 1975- editor.

PN603.G57 2015

809.9145dc23

2014036485

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

I

Origins

Introduction

British Romanticism and Early Globalization: Developing the Modern World Picture

Evan Gottlieb

G lobalization is now well established as one of the twenty-first centurys most-discussed subjects. Nevertheless, the connection asserted in this collections title between globalization and British Romanticism may strike some readers as counterintuitive; the former, after all, is largely associated (especially in popular accounts) with contemporaneity, and the latter continues to be associated, politically speaking, with colonialism and imperialism. This introduction attempts to revise both of these positions, first by reviewing how changes in Romantic literary historical scholarship are facilitating new understandings of the eras sociopolitical investments, then by considering some working definitions and recent theories of globalization itself. Finally, I turn to a brief discussion of this volumes organization and thematic concerns. As readers will discover for themselves, the chapters in this volume make a convincing case that the Romantics were alternately fascinated, frightened, and inspired by their increasingly globalized world.

British Romanticisms political commitments have long been the subject of interest and contestation, from early-nineteenth-century reviewers excoriation of John Keatss cockney pretensions, through the Victorians whitewashing of Percy Shelleys radical commitments, to the New Critics willful exclusion of all politics from the aesthetic project of Romantics. Although the academic recovery of the political dimensions of Romanticism has several modern starting points, Marilyn Butlers Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 17601830 (1981) deserves particular notice for marking a turning point. Although its subtitle sounds vestigially New Critical, Butlers approach is remarkably forward thinking. Instead of claiming a clear demarcation between a canonical set of literary texts and the historical background from which it emerges like a timeless butterfly shedding its chrysalisthe paradigm that M. H. Abrams, Harold Bloom, and Northrop Frye each employed, with characteristic variations, to bolster Romanticisms critical respectability a few years earlierButler makes the opposite case. Asserting in her opening chapter that literature, like all art, like language, is a collective activity, powerfully conditioned by social forces, she proceeds to demonstrate that authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but citizens. In doing so, Butler not only anticipates the demystifying impetus of Jerome J. McGanns equally influential The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983) but also positions Romantic studies to take full advantage of the sociologically oriented, New Historical approaches that would dominate Anglo-American literature departments during the coming decades. Despite using the traditional modifier English in her subtitle to describe the periods literature, moreover, Butler takes a broad approach in practice, paying welcome attention to Irish contributions to Romanticism, as well as to Scottish and Welsh inflections. She thus both takes seriously the political ramifications of the Romantics aesthetic and generic choicesfrom William Cobbetts pastoral radicalism to Keatss liberal historicismand anticipates contemporary four-nations or archipelagic understandings of Great Britain as internally heterogeneous.