David Duff Romanticism and the Uses of GenreRomanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

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Previous articleNext article FreeDavid Duff Romanticism and the Uses of Genre Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.Charles I. ArmstrongCharles I. ArmstrongUniversity of Agder Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 1924, Arthur O. Lovejoy famously showed just how self-contradictory the common conception of Romanticism is. Opposing characteristics, he argued, were typically described as being essential to the literature of the period. Romanticism was both nature centered and philosophically idealist, not only anarchistic but also authoritarian, as well as being just as frequently described as nostalgic as obsessed with newness and originality. To these paradoxes, and the many others unearthed by subsequent critical engagement, we can now add that Romanticism as a period was characterized by a wish not only to combine and transform existing genres but also to transcend genre altogether.This is the central paradox of David Duff’s fine new study, which convincingly brings forth new detail and new insight to our understanding of how British Romanticism, in a great variety of ways, engaged with all matters concerning genre. Within the rich field of Romantic Studies, Duff’s book has several predecessors—particularly Stuart Curran’s invaluable Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 1986) comes to mind—but the breadth and theoretically informed nature of this work makes it a very worthwhile addition to the field. Being not only the editor of the critical reader Modern Genre Theory (Harlow: Pearson, 2000) but also the author of a substantial monograph on Percy Shelley (Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre [Cambridge University Press, 1994]), Duff makes good use of his obvious credentials for delivering a major contribution to the understanding of Romantic use of genre.The first chapter, titled “The Old Imperial Code,” establishes the eighteenth-century precedents to which the Romantics were responding. Duff conveys how early neoclassicism had seen the literary genres as timeless and imputable entities, a view that encouraged submissive copying rather than innovation. Already long before the eighteenth century, though, this vantage point was being challenged, and the mainstream perspective subtly but significantly changed over time. Here Duff’s instructive and clear overview focuses on the following adjustments: “relaxation of generic rules; loosening of genre boundaries; acceptance of generic mixture; enlargement of the genre spectrum; shifts in the hierarchy of genres; recognition of the historical variability of genres; and integration of literary genre theory into larger rhetorical or aesthetic systems” (41).Given the fair-minded thoroughness with which Duff delineates the nuanced state of genre theory and practice at the end of the eighteenth century, he does not make it easy to substantiate his thesis that Romanticism contributed not only a distinctive but also an essentially new position with regard to genre. The tendency in recent work in literary history has been to chip away at the old, established categories, and much recent criticism—including a recent effort such as David Fairer’s Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–98 (Oxford University Press, 2009)—has provided strong indications that the fundamental difference between Romanticism and its predecessors cannot be taken for granted. Scholars cognizant of such work may not be convinced by Duff’s falling back on M. H. Abrams’s distinction between mimetic and expressive theories of literature—combined with an insistence on the politicization of literature in general, and literary genres in particular, as a result of the French revolution—to support his defense of traditional periodization.Notwithstanding this problem, this study is invariably instructive in its actual treatment of Romantic texts and practices. The second chapter, “Romantic Genre Theory,” uses the exploratory musings of Friedrich Schlegel and other German Romantics to develop an overarching theoretical template for Duff's subsequent readings of Romantic works. The Jena Romantics have been widely studied in recent decades, making a not inconsiderable impact on modern literary theory, and Duff consistently not only makes percipient links between them and the generic positions of Coleridge and Wordsworth but also shows how Schlegel in particular anticipates central tenets of twentieth-century literary theory, with particular emphasis on Mikhail Bakhtin.The vexed relationship between Romanticism and didacticism is the focus of Duff’s third chapter. He brings out the variety of the Romantic positions regarding didacticism, veering from downright rejection (in many of the familiar pronouncements by key writers such as Percy Shelley and Coleridge) to unmitigated endorsement. Duff convincingly shows that “it is a simplification to suggest that the Romantics liberated themselves in any consistent way from the temptations (if that is the right word) of didacticism” (98). Characteristically for a study that tends to privilege overview (and the breadth of its examples) over principled discussion, this chapter does not, however, quite succeed in coming up with a convincing argument for Duff’s enticing claim that didacticism and antididacticism “were dialectically related, and defining and historically producing the other” (116).The subsequent chapter argues for another, seemingly less challenging, dialectic: that between archaism and innovation. Here Duff returns to the prehistory of Romanticism, surveying how newness and oldness were included in the developing ideas of generic change not only in eighteenth-century antiquarians such as Thomas Percy but also stretching back to the tussles between Ancient and Moderns in the 1690s. Duff argues that, typically, “the genres we think of as central to Romantic poetry were considered, prior to and even during their revival, to be outmoded, overworked, or defunct” (148). The Romantic cult of the fragment arose as a result of the ensuing, self-conscious sense of belatedness, while Byron’s Childe Harold is “a kind of endgame with genre: at once a revival of romance and a ransacking of it—its apotheosis and its epitaph” (156).One of the less surprising findings of this book is that Romanticism features a large number of instances of the mixing of genres. Different forms of generic impurity are inspected in Duff’s fifth chapter, “The Combinatorial Method.” Here he proposes a terminological distinction of his own, opposing two basic modes: using Coleridge’s dichotomy of imagination and fancy as his starting point, Duff argues that what he calls “rough-mixing” allows the heterogeneity of the used genres to be palpable, while “smooth-mixing” achieves a more harmonious, seamless fit between them. This distinction is used to support his claim that the traditional equation of Romanticism and organicism has caused a certain blindness in the reading of Romantic genre: “the anti-organic, rough-mix method of combination is as common in this period as the organic, constituting a vital if previously neglected strand in the aesthetics of Romanticism” (191).In his conclusion, Duff follows the precedent of Curran in affirming that Romanticism espoused transformation rather than downright rejection of existing genres. The conclusion also features a fascinating critique of M. H. Abrams’s concept of the “Greater Romantic Lyric.” Although Duff grants that this retrospectively constructed genre has some heuristic use, he takes it to task for occluding just how central the deployment of the ode form by writers such as Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats was to the Romantic achievement. This is one of the high points of Duff’s study. But Romanticism and the Uses of Genre is full of invigorating insights regarding both canonized and more marginalized Romantic engagements with genre. It is an impressive achievement, which should prove to be a useful aid to future critical explorations of the development of literary genre in not only Romanticism but also other periods. For, as Duff manages to convincingly demonstrate, we have far too long neglected the literary riches and critical dividends of genre. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 1August 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/670310 Views: 662Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.