Chase - Romanticism

ROMANTICISM

LONGMAN CRITICAL READERS

General Editors:

RAMAN SELDEN, late Emeritus Professor of English,
Lancaster University and late Professor of English,
Sunderland Polytechnic;

STAN SMITH, Professor of English, University of Dundee

Published titles:

K.M. NEWTON, George Eliot

MARY EAGLETON, Feminist Literary Criticism

GARY WALLER, Shakespeares Comedies

JOHN DRAKAKIS, Shakespearean Tragedy

RICHARD WILSON AND RICHARD DUTTON, New Historicism and Renaissance Drama

PETER BROOKER, Modernism/Postmodernism

PETER WIDDOWSON, D.H. Lawrence

RACHEL BOWLBY, Virginia Woolf

FRANCIS MULHERN, Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism

ANNABEL PATTERSON, John Milton

CYNTHIA CHASE, Romanticism

ROMANTICISM

________________

Edited and Introduced by

CYNTHIA CHASE

First published 1993 by Adisson Wesley Longman Group Limited
Second impression 1996

Published 2014 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1993, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
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ISBN13: 978-0-582-04799-0 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Romanticism / edited and introduced by Cynthia Chase.

p. cm. (Longman critical readers)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-582-05000-6 (csd). ISBN 0-582-04799-4 (ppr).

1. English literature 19th century History and criticism.

2. Romanticism Great Britain. I. Chase, Cynthia, 1953. II. Series.

Contents

The outlines of contemporary critical theory are now often taught as a standard feature of a degree in literary studies. The development of particular theories has seen a thorough transformation of literary criticism. For example, Marxist and Foucauldian theories have revolutionized Shakespeare studies, and deconstruction has led to a complete reassessment of Romantic poetry. Feminist criticism has left scarcely any period of literature unaffected by its searching critiques. Teachers of literary studies can no longer fall back on a standardized, received, methodology.

Lecturers and teachers are now urgently looking for guidance in a rapidly changing critical environment. They need help in understanding the latest revisions in literary theory, and especially in grasping the practical effects of the new theories in the form of theoretically sensitized new readings. A number of volumes in the series anthologize important essays on particular theories. However, in order to grasp the full implications and possible uses of particular theories it is essential to see them put to work. This series provides substantial volumes of new readings, presented in an accessible form and with a significant amount of editorial guidance.

Each volume includes a substantial introduction which explores the theoretical issues and conflicts embodied in the essays selected and locates areas of disagreement between positions. The pluralism of theories has to be put on the agenda of literary studies. We can no longer pretend that we all tacitly accept the same practices in literary studies. Neither is a laissez-faire attitude any longer tenable. Literature departments need to go beyond the mere toleration of theoretical differences: it is not enough merely to agree to differ; they need actually to stage the differences openly. The volumes in this series all attempt to dramatize the differences, not necessarily with a view to resolving them but in order to foreground the choices presented by different theories or to argue for a particular route through the impasses the differences present.

The theory revolution has had real effects. It has loosened the grip of traditional empiricist and romantic assumptions about language and literature. It is not always clear what is being proposed as the new agenda for literary studies, and indeed the very notion of literature is questioned by the post-structuralist strain in theory. However, the uncertainties and obscurities of contemporary theories appear much less worrying when we see what the best critics have been able to do with them in practice. This series aims to disseminate the best of recent criticism and to show that it is possible to re-read the canonical texts of literature in new and challenging ways.

RAMAN SELDEN AND STAN SMITH

The Publishers and fellow Series Editor regret to record that Raman Selden died after a short illness in May 1991 at the age of fifty-three. Ray Selden was a fine scholar and a lovely man. All those he has worked with will remember him with much affection and respect.

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Basil Blackwell Ltd for extracts from Keatss Life of Allegory by Marjorie Levinson (1988); University of Chicago Press and the author, Margaret Homans, for extracts from the chapter Bearing Demons: Frankensteins Circumvention of the Maternal from Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing (1986); the author, Jerome Christensen, for his essay Byrons Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism; the author, Geoffrey Hartman and Centennial Review for the article Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness from Centennial Review, (Autumn 1962) and from Beyond Formalism (Yale University Press, 1970), Geoffrey Hartman; Johns Hopkins University Press for the chapter Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud from Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud by Cathy Caruth (1990), the chapter The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime by Neil Hertz from Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text edited by Geoffrey Hartman (1978), the article Time and History in Wordsworth by Paul de Man from Diacritics 17 (Winter 1987), 1988 Johns Hopkins University Press, and the article Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the character of