Romanticism, Now & Then: An Introduction

Abstract

Romanticism, Now & ThenAn Introduction Bruce Holsinger and Andrew Stauffer In April 2018, the eight scholars whose work appears in these pages convened on the grounds of the University of Virginia around the subject "Romanticism, Now & Then." This issue of New Literary History appears on the eve of the journal's fiftieth anniversary, and it reflects the founding editor's vision for its special issues more broadly: "The organizing center of the issue is a single subject—the problems of literary history—treated from diverse areas, perspectives and disciplines."1 The field of Romanticism, at least in English departments, has played a formative role in the development of literary history as a discipline. It has been the pivot, in some ways, between questions of the philological and the cultural, the practical and the theoretical, the formalist and the historicist—no doubt in part as a legacy of what Richard Macksey has identified as "the Romantic welling up of a search for method that was to be the common concern binding together the humane disciplines."2 At the same time, the issue grapples with Romanticism, according to sound NLH precedent, as at once a "theme, a method, and an intellectual problem," in Rita Felski's phrase, both timely and "untimely."3 Romanticism's ambiguous temporalities are the founding problem of the essays presented here. Our title, "Romanticism, Now & Then," echoes the structure of the journal's name, in which "New" and "History" bookend the "Literary" as antagonistic yet codependent temporalities. We here frame Romanticism with a similar set of terms: the "now" of our cultural and scholarly moment rubbing against the "then" of the past—the now of Romanticist theory and criticism working upon the then of literary history. As Jonathan Sachs has recently observed, the Romantic era was marked by cultural pressures in both directions: a sense of accelerated novelty shadowed by a growing awareness of deep time.4 In that contact zone, historicism found its methodological posture and idiom, what James Chandler has called the "enabling framework" that Romanticism provided for the task of "historical analysis."5 As the essays presented here suggest, such intertwining of object and method remains the contested signature of the field. [End Page v] At the same time, the phrase "now and then" brings to mind the occasional nature of Romanticism: its fitful arrivals and sudden fadings, its revolutionary cycles and self-vexed creations, its present tenses and tense presences across the uncertain timelines of subjective experience—what Tristram Wolff identifies in his essay here as "Romanticism's willful yet casual self-difference, and the resulting arrhythmia at its heart." Almost inevitably, we are brought back to the occasion of reading. Romanticism clearly inherited from the eighteenth century what Christina Lupton has called "a temporally discontinuous practice of reading," and thus of textuality more broadly: the literary cultures of Romanticism "depended on and reproduced temporal striation," installing heterochronicity in its objects and subjects alike—including its present day critics.6 Since contemporary critical frameworks are in many ways shaped by the discourse and ideologies of the Romantic era, this issue's framing resonates with its subject matter, the spontaneous overflows of April now collected in something like tranquility. In the same spirit, our title also looks forward, its "then" pointing toward futurity. The new literary historian abides in the dawning of what William Wordsworth names "something evermore about to be."7 This is especially true for the Romanticist, for whom revolutionary breakages seem always predicated on the enshrinement of the past, and contemporaneity upon an urgent sense of historicity. From the perspective of at least six disciplines—English, musicology, American studies, African American and African studies, art history, and comparative literature—and various national traditions and transnational currents, this issue explores the abiding concepts and keywords of Romanticism, while also discriminating among the various methods, forms, and cultural and political valences of Romantic art in different contexts, here and there, now and then. Our hope, in the midst of the ongoing Romantic bicentennial, is to prompt newly vital consideration of what Romanticism has been as a field of study and where it might be heading as our subject matter enters its third...