Introduction: Romanticism in a New Key

Abstract

Introduction: Romanticism in a New Key Adriana Craciun On april 5 and 6, 2019, scholars and students from three countries gathered at Boston University for a symposium organized in part by Studies in Romanticism to celebrate the extraordinary impact Jerome J. McGann has made across the humanities. The essays of all twelve speakers at Romanticism in a New Key: A Symposium in Honor of Jerome McGann were then revised and included here in this special issue devoted to the shaping influence of McGann’s body of work, from 1983’s field-redefining The Romantic Ideology to 2014’s A New Republic of Letters, his manifesto on humanistic scholarly practice in our age of rapidly changing knowledge media. The authors span a range of senior and younger scholars of British and American Romanticism, and all were invited to reflect on McGann’s expansive critical, editorial, or digital humanities work through the lens of a particular book or dimension of his work. Because our journal is devoted to the study of Romanticisms, the issue’s focus understandably focuses on that field and its relation to textual and digital studies, leaving aside McGann’s significant work in Victorian and Modernist literature. The image for our cover and the original symposium poster is a still from the BBC series Taboo, co-written by and starring Tom Hardy as the antihero James Delaney, a mixed race Regency adventurer who exposes the egregious exploitation underpinning London’s extraordinary imperial wealth. Striding across the Thames foreshore, Delaney evokes the High Romantic tradition of the Rückenfigur, as in Friedrich’s contemplative “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist). But as the muck and movement of Delaney’s coattails suggest, his is indeed a Romanticism in a new key. Delaney is fond of saying “I like to see what lies beneath,” and here he joins Byron and McGann, who have repeatedly followed the impulse “to see the other side of my world.”1 As scholars in this special issue and beyond attest, Jerome McGann’s work has opened up new worlds in our understandings of Romanticism, giving [End Page 395] us powerful scholarly instruments and imaginative engagements with which to rediscover the aesthetic and political richness of the period we love so well. [End Page 396] Footnotes 1. McGann, “Rethinking Romanticism,” in McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 253. Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Boston University