Romanticism and form

Abstract

ROMANTICISM AND FORM. Edited by Alan Rawes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xv + 231. ISBN 978-1-4039-9472-1. £45.00. Hands up who's a New Formalist. While my hands remain, if perhaps fidgety, fixed in proximity to my keyboard, it is pleasing to note a recent flourishing of, or at any rate an increased interest in, close reading within literary critical circles. Even Terry Eagleton, in his fashionably didactic How to Read a Poem of last year, seems to be getting in on the act. Noticeably, this shift in critical parameters has been more a theoretical than a practical phenomenon. The achievement of important works such as Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature and Susan Wolfson's Formal Charges, that is to say, is not primarily a function of their own close analyses (acute as these often are), but of the effort they contain to theorise and liberate such forms of reading practice within a critical sphere dominated by various dogmatic strains of historicism. Much in this spirit, the present collection of essays is driven by an agenda for change, a wish to overturn what Gavin Hopps adroitly terms the 'policing of possibility' that is seen as an effect of the Marxist-flavoured new historicism most famously represented in Romantic Studies by Jerome McGann's influential The Romantic Ideology. Hopps's theological perspective seeks to replace unidirectional decisiveness with a reasoned sense of diverse possibilities, as a basis for engaging with literary thought. But the volume's critique of historicism is accretive and variegated. As well as a thoughtful introduction by Alan Rawes and a suggestive afterword by Susan Wolfson, Mark Sandy's astute essay, for example, takes up the baton by calling into question historicism's privileging of the contemporary over the future reader. Not surprisingly, in this company, theoretical positioning is well supplemented by a series of essays that explore the minute particulars of poetic language, structure and tradition. Michael O'Neill's sure-handed weaving together of Byron and Wordsworth, and his equally skilful disentangling of their specific formal commitments, is typically engaging. More skilled reading of Wordsworth comes from Rawes, in his probing analysis of 'Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'. One of the reasons why good close reading remains a culturally urgent activity is that it moves past the culture of 'all been said before' to recognise the vital historical role that great poetry plays through its endless suggestiveness. In saying this, I do not suggest that close attention is limited to linguistic play. Caroline Franklin provides a welcome essay on Jane Austen's negotiations with Byronism in that most literary of novels, Persuasion. Franklin's sure historical analysis will be of great use to subsequent scholars, but her thoughtful comparative reading of Austen and Byron as masters of indirect style will keep them thinking as well. Any liberating agenda worth its salt knows not to push too far into new kinds of narrowness. Romanticism and Form is worth its salt because it has no final agenda about what kinds of reading it permits. As Angela Leighton's recent, elegant book, On Form, confirms, the value of form as a principle of literary analysis lies partly in its elusiveness and openness. While Wolfson in particular has done a service to the history of literary criticism by correcting our understanding of the frequently travestied New Criticism, this does not imply an attempt to reduce the healthy plurality characteristic of contemporary literary scholarship. …