Repossessing the Romantic past

Abstract

Repossessing Romantic Past edited by Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton. Cambridge U. Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 254. $90. past three decades new picture of British Romanticism has emerged in opposition to focus on six male poets in two generations. Along with expansion of field to women writers and prose works, there has been new recognition of continuities between eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism, well an abandonment of oversimplified binaries between rationalism and imagination, Enlightenment and enchantment, constraints of genre and tradition and spontaneous overflow of liberated passion. Repossessing Romantic Past is major collection of well-researched essays that serve to consolidate this expansion and renewal of field of Romantic studies. We can locate an emblem of new conception of Romanticism in Anne Janowitz's chapter on how Lucy Aikin's memoirs serve part of family reputation machine that established fame of Aikin's aunt Anna Laetitia Barbauld (80). Like other contributors to this collection, Janowitz focuses on sociability and conversation, especially in tradition of rational dissent--located here in circle of radical bookseller Joseph Johnson: In Johnson's dining room Fuseli hung his painting The Nightmare, so Johnson's dining club of discursive rationality was overseen by Romantic passions of that frightening and compelling dreamscape (87). this new vision of Romanticism, and its unconscious sources occupy same room rational conversations of politically engaged writers in circle that includes those whom Jon Mee terms disputatious women such Mary Hays and Mary (33). Six of eleven chapters in Repossessing Romantic Past focus on women writers: Janowitz on Aikin; Mee on Barbauld's attraction to what Godwin termed the collision of with mind opposed to bluestocking politeness of dominant Anglican culture; Nigel Leask on Elizabeth Hamilton; Janet Todd on Austen and Professional Wife; and Susan Manly's and James Chandler's contributions to section of book entitled Reopening Case of Edgeworth. addition to exploring culture of rational Dissent, focusing on sociability rather than solitary communion with nature, and positioning Romanticism within rather than against Enlightenment, contributors define Romantic mode that is explicitly non-Wordsworthian, while they reject view of flight from politics. Thus, Kevin Gilmartin replaces conventional Romantic utopianism (the Lakeland republic of Wordsworth's vision) with a potentially shared experience of life in London, which might provide for William Hazlitt radical counterweight to nightmare of Legitimacy (7, 42). Republics, Michael Rossington elevates Marlow in 1817--with working-out of Shelley's differences from Godwin and Hunt--to similar status Alfoxden in 1797, where Wordsworth and Coleridge began their collaboration (65). The book concludes with Jerome McGann's critique of Wordsworth's desire that his poetry be used as form of worship rather than poetic tale (240). McGann sets against idealist Wordsworth tradition of temporality and mortal beauty running from Byron, through Poe and Baudelaire, to Swinburne. similar rejection of Romantic transcendence, once Barbauld is forced ... retirement by practical position of Dissenters in hostile print culture, she did not, according to Jon Mee, transmute these circumstances into romantic idea of 'higher' freedom of imagination (32). An important fact about Repossessing Romantic Past, not indicated on title page or in cataloging information, is that book is intended tribute to Marilyn Butler. The collection concludes with bibliography of Butler's works, compiled by Heather Glen--a list that indicates great range of Butler's scholarship, from four influential books that she published between 1972 and 1981 (Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, Jane Austen and War of Ideas, Peacock Displayed, and Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries), to her editorial labors on Pickering and Chatto editions of works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth, to almost fifty articles, to series of major book reviews especially in London Review of Books. …