SECONDARY READING

Writing and Revolution 1760-1830

This is a summary noting some of the more general texts relevant to the course. More specific reading directions will be included in individual lecture handouts.

In terms of literary history, the period 1760-1830 covers the transition between the Enlightenment and the so-called Romantic Revolution; the latter traditionally dated either from the French Revolution of 1789 or from the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The course is designed to place Romanticism in a large context of political, social and literary change going back much earlier.

Romanticism is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to define. As early as 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy published an article entitled 'On the Discrimination of Romanticisms', in which he argued that there was never one but actually several quite distinguishable kinds of Romanticism (PMLA 39, 1924; reprinted in M.H. Abrams, ed. English Romantic Poets, Oxford: OUP, 1960). This idea faded markedly during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when a number of commentators agreed, each from their own particular perspective, on the notion that there was indeed a single, coherent literary phenomenon definable as Romanticism. The influence of these commentators is still very much with us. Perhaps the most famous of them was M.H. Abrams who, in addition to publishing two major books on the subject, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: OUP, 1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), also produced several seminal essays, including 'English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age' (in Northrop Frye, ed. Romanticism Reconsidered, London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963; reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, New York: W.W. Norton, 1970). Other 'landmark' essays of this phase of Romantic criticism are Northrop Frye, 'The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism' (in Romanticism Reconsidered; reprinted in Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure, London: Methuen, 1970) and Harold Bloom, 'The Internalization of Quest Romance' in Harold Bloom, Romanticism and Consciousness, 1970; reprinted in Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). These and other contemporary commentators tended to see Romanticism as a celebration of the aspiring human spirit and to find in its literature various explorations of the inner workings of the human mind. M.H. Abrams saw this Romantic interest in the mind as a preoccupation in which the energies of socio-political revolution had been transposed into the realm of the spirit. For the older Romantics -- such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey -- early hopes of the French Revolution had not been fulfilled, but in their maturity they could exercise the principle of revolution in the realm of the imagination or spirit.

During the 1980s numerous critics began to point out that such an evaluation of Romanticism tended to beg many historical questions. To imagine that the principle of revolution in a socio-political sense can simply be transferred to the inner workings of the mind is to imagine wrongly, say these critics. Such a transference involves, rather, a suppression and evasion of the social and the historical. The younger Wordsworth, for example, may have been politically radical, but the mature Wordsworth, the Wordsworth of his most famous poems, far from being politically revolutionary, was implicitly and sometimes explicitly reactionary. Important studies, all broadly agreeing on this kind of point, while again coming at their subject from different positions, include Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: OUP, 1981), Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation (London: Chicago Univ. Press, 1983) and Marjorie Levinson's Wordsworth's Great Period Poems. Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).

Along with this newer historicist reading of the Romantic writers have come studies which point out that the 'great' Romantic poets as we know them today -- Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats -- are but six male writers from a period when there were a very large number of female writers. Along with arguing against this exclusion of female writers from the canon feminist critics have been concerned to examine the gendered, specifically masculinist perspective on the mind and on reality amongst the six canonized 'great' Romantics. Relevant studies here include Anne K. Mellor, ed. Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988) and Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, London, Routledge 1993.

Surveyed from a Scottish standpoint, the definitions of Romanticism, and the history of its reception, alter again. Here the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with its emphasis on rationality, moderateness and social progress arguably remains as a more explicit influence on later writings -- or, alternatively, they can been seen as a sentimentalizing betrayal of Enlightenment ideas. Writers' preoccupations with what could be described as anti-rational -- the suprnatural, the uncanny -- can, for example, be interpreted as a characteristic of Scottish writing in all periods, derived from the ballad and oral traditions, as well as being consistent with a contemporary resurgence of interest in the Gothic and the 'primitive' throughout Europe.

In addition to the books mentioned above, some of which deal with Scottish writers, the following include discussions of the period 1760-1830 from a Scottish perspective: The History of Scottish Literature, vols 2-3 (AUP, 1987-8); A History of Scottish Women's Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy MacMillan (EUP, 1997); C. Beveridge and R. Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Polygon, 1997), and Scotland After Enlightenment (Polygon, 1997); Cairns Craig, Out of History, (Polygon, 1996); Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (OUP, 1992); Marshall Walker, Scottish Literature Since 1707 (Longmans, 1997).

This course will survey the rich and complex field of literature between 1760 and 1830 by taking into account the multiple and frequently contradictory views of the period which have developed in the twentieth century. A survey of the literature of the Romantic period as well as of subsequent readings of Romanticism as a phenomenon is to be found in Aidan Day's Romanticism (Routledge, Critical Idiom, 1996).

Aidan Day and Helen Boden

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