Romanticism and the Uses of Genre by David Duff

Abstract

David Duff. Romanticsm and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii+256. $99.00. The question of genre is still one of the thorniest in literary criticism, and its complexities persist beyond all theoretical paradigms brought bear on it. Romantic genre, arguably the very ground of our cultural conundrums about reference, historicity, and class, has found a worthy scholar in David Duff, who gathers the dense materials of his subject with an unblinking rigor. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre thus joins Stuart Curran's magisterial Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) lay bare the nuanced foundations of Romantic poetics. Duff sets out to understand the distinctive genre-consciousness of the Romantic period (vii), no easy task given that critical opinion about the Romantics' position on the subject is still deeply fractious. Though it has long been recognized that, far from disregarding the strictures of genre and form, Romantic authors were keenly interested in their meaning, our understanding of the architecture of Romantic genre is still troubled by the varying claims made by poets and critics alike about its significance: now claiming transcend genre, now chiming have rescued it anew, the tendency of the Romantics themselves is stage contradictory positions on the subject. In so doing, asserts Duff, the authors were modeling real self-divisions, for the awareness of genre in Romanticism is tantamount a particular kind of self-consciousness, with genre serving as one resource for the expressive mind, which of necessity contains self-divisions and self-contradictions. Romantic self-consciousness and Romantic genre-consciousness are inextricably joined, even when its authors are calling for the dissolution of the putative strangleholds posed by genre. Duff is more interested in genre as a concept than he is in calibrating any particular generic expression; however, this book is still packed with very detailed information about the particulars. Those particulars have their basis in the period's own obvious efforts work out the brave new world of revolutionary form. As the author points out at various points throughout his study, it is not our own modern theorists who first noticed the political inflections of generic innovation. William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, indeed even Francis Jeffrey linked political transformation with aesthetic change, and they were as sensitive the connections between the revolutionary 1790s and generic change, as they were the literary inheritance that they sought refract through their contemporaneity. No longer a set of inherited codes with prescriptive rules, which is how genre functioned for the Neoclassicals, it became with Romanticism an opportunity appropriate the past and recast it for the present and future. Subverting generic decorum, though, is not tantamount disregarding it. Rather, the Romantics enlarged the possibilities of genre, expanded its spectrum, and harnessed it as a forum for originality. While they did revive such genres as romance, sonnet, epic, ballad, and pastoral, Duff points out that [w]hat is important is that in each case an effort of imaginative retrieval is involved. Unlike earlier revivalist movements such as neoclassicism, however, Romanticism had reckon with the temporality of the genres it sought retrieve and adopt.... They were defined not by their 'rules,' but by their origins, their history, their ethnic associations, their genealogy (145). If genre is no longer a set of transcendent rules, then retrieving and reworking its history becomes also a nationalist enterprise. British poetry exults in the long tradition of British appropriations of genre, and negotiating a generic history is an opportunity assert one's authority with respect it. The sonnet may be Italian in its provenance, but it came England at the moment of Elizabethan cultural ascendancy, and it was revived by the Romantics in part as an instance of specifically British expressive ingeniousness. …