Reviewed by: The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday by William H. Galperin Magdalena Ostas (bio) William H. Galperin. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. 181. $55. The demand for a theoretical articulation of our relationship to “the everyday” has always been fraught with genuinely interesting difficulties. Insofar as the category captures a sense of what is pervasive in experience (Blanchot, as William Galperin notes in this study, describes the everyday as “what we are first of all, and most often”), we might ask what kinds of theoretical perspectives allow us to touch this idea of life as it is actually lived. Many of the philosophers, social theorists, and literary critics in the long history of interest in the everyday—the shapes of daily lives, the invisibility of mundane events, the look of objects of apparent insignificance, the feelings that attend repetition, the emergence of unreflective attitudes, the habits of ordinary speech—surrender the ambition to define the category, and they often turn, instead, to reflecting on our orientation or attitude toward this dimension of experience. Accordingly, it has been said that the everyday harbors real critical and creative potential as often as it has been asserted that it is the realm of deadening predictability and inauthenticity. In The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, William Galperin registers the contemporary interest in the everyday with some skepticism. In contrast to the picture of the everyday as what is familiar, the everyday in Galperin’s study of Romanticism surfaces as a form of relation with the past and not with present-tense experience. In the sequence of wide-ranging and insightful readings he offers across Romantic-era visual arts (the panorama), lyric and narrative poetry (Wordsworth and Byron), novels (Austen), and epistolary correspondence (the Byron controversy), Galperin argues that the everyday is not open—paradoxically—to observation and that it becomes perceptible, instead, through forms of recollection or retrospection. Galperin derives his theoretical framework from a cluster of figures whose convergence is approximately familiar but whose collective relation to the idea of the everyday might be less apparent: Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Stanley Cavell, and Paul de Man. In the opening chapter Galperin writes thus: [End Page 325] The everyday’s emergence and early conceptualization as a history of what was missed, as something appreciable in retrospect but not in real time, is more than just analogous to what a Marxist like Lefebvre also finds missing and lacking; it is at cross-purposes—and significantly so—with the very developments of which romantic-period discourse, in its subscriptions to interiority and individualism, remains a signal manifestation. (33) What we might think of as the everyday’s historiographic deep structure turns out over the course of Galperin’s readings to contend with the import of presentness in Romanticism’s understanding of selfhood. The important contribution of Galperin’s study thus lies in the way he conceptualizes the elusiveness of the everyday in temporal rather than perceptual terms: Romantic writers’ sense that the everyday often escapes or appears hidden stems from their recognition that it can only be encountered after it has passed and projected a “counter-actual history” (6) and not from the everyday’s permeating present-tense invisibility that renders it too ubiquitous to manifest or impress itself. The Romantic texts at the center of Galperin’s chapters exhibit a structure of retrospection whereby “the missed, the unappreciated, [and] the overlooked” come into consciousness with sudden and unexpected proximity (27). These recovered moments, what Galperin throughout calls “a history of missed opportunities,” are a revelation of things as they are re-seen and come into view through backward glances cast in the “prevailing afterwardness ” (18) or aftermath of experience. The chapter that engages the double-takes of Wordsworth’s poetry across moments in The Prelude, Lyrical Ballads, and the “Immortality Ode,” accordingly, concentrates on the conflict between the poet’s retrospective connection with nature and the Wordsworthian faith in the imagination as an agency working in the present. Wordsworth for Galperin instantiates an order...