The history in literature: on value, genre, institutions // Review

Author: Lindenberger, Herbert; Weisman, Karen A

ProQuest document link
Abstract:
Don Bialostosky's 'Wordsworth, New Literary Histories, and the
Constitution of Literature' sets itself equally to the task of salvaging value, and
therefore equally to the line of contemporary apologetics that has grown up in
response to the scene of contemporary criminalizations. Bialostosky argues for a
vision of Romanticism which, rather than subverting social action, offers a
vision of empowerment: 'Romantic discourse and Wordsworth's contribution to
it should not be dismissed as a seductive regime that disables us with its
addictive and complacent consolation. Wordsworth's vision of a democracy of
active and disciplined sensibilities, inspired by its poets but not overawed by
them, still retains the power to inform our practices and underwrite our
institutions, but the struggle to realize that vision is only now coming to
maturity' (421). M.H. Abrams's essay on 'Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads'
joins the debate, but from a unique perspective: the Wordsworth against whom
recent critics take issue is very much a Wordsworth of Abrams's invention; the
Wordsworth of Abrams's naturalized supernaturalism is the standard which
many recent critics have sought to qualify, and so his critique of Levinson,
[Jerome McGann], and others carries special resonances. Abrams objects to
those political readings which, he believes, are 'designed to subvert what a poet
undertook to say, what his text seems to say, and what other readers have taken
him to say, in order to convert manifest meanings into a mask, or displacement,
or (another of Levinson's terms) an "allegory" for the real meaning - in this case,
a political meaning - whose discovery has been reserved for the proponent of the
theory' (322). It would be easy to dismiss Abrams as the mere leftover of a
1

bygone era which believed that poets were good and true and to be believed; and
indeed, the second part of his essay is devoted to an example of his own
approach to 'Tintern Abbey,' one which recalls us to the Abrams of such still
magisterial essays as 'Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.'
'Correcting,' as it were, new - historicist readings of the poem with his own
reading does leave him somewhat vulnerable, but Abrams does not seem to be
particularly interested in guarding against his own critical vulnerability. Instead,
he offers a statement precisely of the variety which most of us simply could not
get away with, at least not without being identified with the political Right: 'Nor
have political Newreaders avoided the further risk of cancelling the imaginative
delights that works of literature, in their diversity, have yielded to readers of all
eras. For a rigorously political reading is not only a closed, monothematic
reading; it is also joyless, casting a critical twilight in which all poems are gray'
(326). The latter statement, to be sure, could indeed be shot through with holes,
but Abrams is approaching the issue, in fact, on the same note with which
[Herbert Lindenberger] ends: is there a joy to be found in literature which will
not make us sound hopelessly nave or politically suspect? Can we qualify
monothematic political readings without announcing ourselves as fascists out to
perpetuate the status quo? Indeed, in 'Wordsworth and the Options for
Contemporary American Poetry,' [Charles Altieri] warns that 'purity of
ideological critique risks banality of imaginative assertion' (195). The final
section of The Romantics and Us volume, 'Culture,' might suggest that we are
only just beginning to grasp the relationship between ideological critique and
'imaginative assertion' (though, to be fair, 'imaginative assertion' is a term which
holds very little water with new historicists). In an interesting essay on
Coleridge's 'The Eolian Harp,' [Gene Ruoff] calls for a more engaged
understanding of another widely demonized term, belief: 'Modern criticism's
avoidance of belief, which often claims its warrant from Coleridge's own strictly
2

circumscribed "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which

constitutes poetic faith," distorts and enervates the Romantic achievement. The
dialogic of a poem like "The Eolian Harp" calls for an equally dialogical
criticism, which is willing both to enter fully into a work's theological and
metaphysical positions and to provide its best reasoned responses to Coleridge's
open invitation, "What if?"' (300). Ann Mellor's essay, 'Why Women Didn't Like
Romanticism: The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley,' seeks to rehabilitate
these women by claiming for their works a pervasive and conscious critique of
Romantic norms - or more precisely, it seems, what have come down to us as
Romantic norms.
Full text:
Since the appearance in 1983 of Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology, it
has been virtually axiomatic that literary criticism - especially the literary
criticism of Romanticism - has inadvertently relinquished the cultural self consciousness which defines responsible distance, as it were, between one's
subject and oneself - one's literary critical self, that is.(f.1) Indeed, if
Romanticists are sure of nothing else these days, it is that the self, so lately
under sentence of death, has received not only a reprieve, but an enthusiastic, if
somewhat qualified, public vindication. For, whatever ideological commitments
to the self's absorption within communal norms are current on the contemporary
critical scene, it is self - consciousness that will save us from the sins of
wholesale (and navely facile) appropriation of our inherited cultural contexts,
and it is the critically situated self, which knows itself as a situated self, that will
provide us with the means with which to survey the 'spirit of the age' of
Romanticism from within a hypersensitivity to the putative spirit of our own
age.(f.2) These three books attempt to engage the current debates over the
ideological implications of Romantic criticism and of Romantic continuities
3

within contemporary culture. All three bear testimony to the current predilection
for situating the self, a self largely enmeshed within Romantic constructs of the
interiorized self, of subjectivity, and of the internalized quest romance. We are
virtually helpless to conceive of Romanticism because we have been conceived
by Romanticism. Almost everybody has something to say, then, about the
dangers lurking within Romantic modes of discourse; very few have found a
way to escape the rhetoric of negation by which the academy has lately been
attending to the deconstruction of our culturally inherited ills. Like Shelley's
exclamations about the simultaneous virtues and limitations of the 'intellectual
philosophy,' this rhetoric 'establishes no new truth, it gives us no additional
insight into our hidden nature, neither its action, nor itself ... It reduces the mind
to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and
signs, the instruments of its own creation.'(f.3) What we must ask, finally and
inevitably, is not 'Is there a text in this class?' but rather whether we even want
any readers for the texts - the real, physical, printed texts - which we do teach in
our classes anyway.
Herbert Lindenberger's book is important because it marks something of a full
critical circle, one which moves from readerly zeal to professorial scepticism
and back again to hints of a renewed interest in actually reading canonized texts.
Lindenberger's work on Wordsworth and Romanticism during the past
generation has been influential and important, but like most critics who have
recently taken up the mantle of new historicism, he has recently sought to
qualify his past ways, to make amends for a presumed navety which he has
surely outgrown and which, so the familiar story increasingly goes, too many of
us have not yet even recognized. Lindenberger attempts to distinguish 'old
historicism' from what he prefers to call 'new History': old historicism, he
explains, produced a critic who 'was essentially the guardian of tradition, a
glorified custodian whose task was the preservation and transmission of what
4

had long since passed as sanctified. Self - effacement was his characteristic
stance as he confronted those great works he felt himself elected to keep intact
for the posterity he could confidently assume would be revering them in future
centuries' (191). How could we ever have been so stupid? Lindenberger is
attacking the enemy at its weakest point, though he charitably frames the charge
as the merely benevolent chastisement of the newly enlightened; he gives
examples of how he himself used to teach Wordsworth's 'Resolution and
Independence' in the bad old days of New Criticism (he sought to 'justify' its
admixture of high and low styles and to celebrate Wordsworth's 'genius'), and
how he has since learned that 'it is a poem's critical history and not what was
long referred to as "the poem itself," that articulates the poem's value over time.
Our respect for the authority of the poem's interpreters serves to define and
guarantee our respect for poet and poem' (51). Thus, Lindenberger is finally able
to ask questions which he presumes have not been asked before: 'How, for
example, did the romantic view of poetry come to crowd out other views in the
consciousness of readers? What precisely was the training process by which
readers came to change those older expectations that Wordsworth, in the Preface
of 1800, saw as barriers to the proper reception of his poetry?' (32). These are
indeed crucially important and insightful questions, but The History in Literature
does not cover a ground of historical research broad enough to answer them
satisfactorily. More to the point, though, it is hard to imagine that anyone really
believes that such questions were never dreamed of in the philosophies of any
pre - 1980s thinkers, or that 'traditionalists' would find them offensive.
Commenting further on the current conventions of the new history, he warns that
'Behind and beyond these conventions lie some assumptions potentially
threatening to most traditional notions governing literary study, for example,
assumptions that genres, canons, and genders are not given by nature but rather
are socially constructed, or that literary texts need not be accorded any status
5

differentiating them from texts not customarily defined as "literary"' (206). It

would seem that Lindenberger's terror of essentialism has been translated into
extreme accusations of the essentialism lurking within that phantom figure, the
'traditional notion.' Canonization and canonical exclusion are immensely
complicated issues, but few scholars ever doubted that genres and canons are
constructed; to be sure, we are only now attending to that complexity with
specialized rigour, but Lindenberger's assessment of the opposition belies the
clear - sighted liberalism his book seeks to proclaim. For pre - 1980s criticism
has itself been constructed as a facile, nave, politically suspect, ideologically
dangerous, automaton activity, one in which formalism has been constructed as
an evil Other and in which a band of happy academics putatively sought to seal
themselves hermetically inside of poems with the hope that all secrets would be
revealed therein. Surely we can move beyond new critical pieties, deconstructive
ahistoricism, and facile canonizations without reading our critical forebears in so
unnuanced a fashion. For what this amounts to, ironically enough, is one of the
large Romantic paradigms which we're supposed to be finally eschewing - that
is, we are harking back to a Keatsian 'grand march of intellect' scenario, in
which the 1980s and 1990s are to be regarded as the dawn of consciousness.
Indeed, it is a narrative of the self and the self's conversion and the self's
consciousness which inadvertently unfolds in Lindenberger's book, and in many
of the essays collected in the other two volumes. Learning to reject the old
paradigms of the Romantic imagination and Romantic creativity has been for
Lindenberger a romance of self - awareness, a quest - very internalized - for the
grail of self - rectification from which truth (a historicized truth, mind you)
emerges. After taking us through the paces of his 1950s pedagogical valorization
of 'Resolution and Independence,' he returns to his central theme: 'With a
generation's time - span and a long succession of critical paradigms separating
me from the person who once sought to justify this poem in the manner I have
6

described, I have come to inquire into how, precisely, we gain the love we feel
for particular literary works' (50). Then he remembers it has precious little to do
with the poem itself. For Lindenberger, the new history is quite different: Instead
of simply asking, as did the older history, how his setting can help us understand
and interpret some literary masterpiece, the new history investigates the
historical network by which a work came to be canonized as a masterpiece in the
first place. Moreover, instead of separating the work from its setting, it
recognizes that the setting as we know it is itself made up of verbal texts that are
not necessarily different in kind from the literary text. Instead of taking
programmatic theoretical statements of writers at face value, the new history
treats these statements - as indeed this essay has itself attempted to do - as
objects for historical examination. If the older history had faith that it could
render the past 'wie es eigentlich gewesen,' the new history assumes the
problematic nature of historical investigation from the outset. (81).
The present 'wie es eigentlich gewesen' may not be anything we're likely to put
our critical fingers on, but it is one in which Lindenberger himself finally feels
under assault. He never does present a very strong case for the place of new
historicist readings of Romanticism, but the most intriguing chapter of his book
is the epilogue, which is in the form of an interview between 'author' and
'interlocutor.' We return, then, to the romance of the self, but this time the self,
which has passed from critical innocence to experience, is seeking to reclaim a
higher innocence, as it were, one in which the baby does not have to be thrown
out with the proverbial bath water. Despite the potential arrogance of this mock interview form, the section is actually the most effective of the entire book, with
the 'interlocutor' asking, for example, 'How do you account for that shall - we say unnamable quality in literature that people have always had such a hard time
accounting for?' (218). The 'author' replies: 'The whole game all this time was to
set up one's explanatory system in such a way that the system would have some
7

leftovers it could never adequately explain' (218). Lindenberger thus begins - but
only begins - to qualify some of the very notions he puts forward throughout the
book, precisely because, finally, even a narrative about the construction of canon
formation does not seem answerable to that most embarrassing of all
predicaments - that is, the condition of finding pleasure in reading, whether or
not we believe that such pleasure can be reduced to a function of ideological and
social indoctrination. Indeed, it is the pleasures of reading and the pleasures of
influence itself - even socially constructed, wrong - headed influence - which
Gene Ruoff's collection, The Romantics and Us, seeks to address. Ruoff
suggests in the introduction that the volume was put together with the 'general
public' in mind (3), though 'general public' is about as amorphous a term these
days as 'traditional notion.' The essays in the book are collected from the lectures
given in 1988 in Chicago, for a series held in conjunction with the exhibition
'William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism.' In the first section,
'Testimony,' Diane Wakoski, John Matthias, and Alicia Ostriker offer reflections
on what British Romanticism has meant to them as practising poets. Though
Diane Wakoski's essay is by far the weakest in the volume - she identifies
Wordsworth's penchant for poetic secrets as the primary point of his influence
upon her - both Matthias and Ostriker attest to what the Romantics have actually
meant to them. For Matthias, it was a reading of Wordsworth that brought him to
fullest consciousness of his relationship with Suffolk and East Anglia. For
Ostriker, it is Blake's visionary comedy that has enabled her to confront her own
mythology of longing.
These testimonies might serve as important counterparts to some of the essays
collected in the Romantic Revolutions volume, which also brings together
lectures from a 1988 symposium. In his introduction, Kenneth Johnston suggests
that the very question 'What is Romanticism?' has itself become 'a minor genre
of imaginative writing' (x). The section in the book entitled 'Romanticism
8

without Wordsworth' contains probing essays by James K. Chandler, Marilyn

Butler, Gary Kelly, and John Murdoch, each of which challenges - as
Lindenberger would have us challenge - the relevance of our reliance on an
ethos of Romanticism dictated by inherited assumptions about Wordsworth and
his 'representativeness.' Both Chandler and Butler, in particular, argue forcefully
that Wordsworth was not in fact 'representative' in any thoroughgoing way, that
what has come down to us as normative Romanticism is a mere slice of a very
diverse company. Chandler, in fact, quite reasonably offers a historicized
deconstruction of the very inherited notion of 'representativeness,' and Butler
offers Southey as an alternate candidate for the Romantic prototype, suggesting
that the lyric subjectivity of Wordsworth was virtually anomalous in his day. As
part of her attempt to explain the hidden cultural agendas by which Romanticism
has come to be construed, Butler therefore eschews the process by which
Wordsworth and the rest of the 'big six' are read through such American figures
as Emerson and Stevens: 'The problem here is that a person is known by the
company he keeps. By wishing these colleagues on Wordsworth we perform an
act of interpretation as surely as when we subject his text to a refined close
reading' (137). And Chandler, arguing for an interpretation of Hazlitt's essays
with the theoretical aid of Althusser, suggests that the 'spirit of the age,' if it is
anything, is contradiction, but where contradiction can be assessed in terms
more sophisticated than a dissipation within an essential internal unity: 'In his
writings about Wordsworth all through his life, certainly from the largely
sympathetic review of The Excursion onward, Hazlitt resisted Wordsworth's
"internalization of quest romance" - his way of offering his own experience as
an epitome of his historical culture and his narrative of that experience as the
resolution of its contradictions' (116).
Such single - minded attention to the irrelevance of our single - minded attention
to Wordsworth is a curious cultural phenomenon, one which is becoming more
9

and more common, and which is in fact enlarging the magnifying glass precisely
where, it is claimed, it ought to be reduced. But Chandler and Butler construct
an academic opposition which, like Lindenberger's, is foolish enough to believe
everything at face value and to read everyone in the terms of those values. The
notion of representativeness and representative men and women can indeed be
processed in rather facile terms, and it is at the weakest point of possibility that
it is being challenged. Wordsworth, to be sure, does not represent the
disenfranchised, the homeless, the mass of early nineteenth - century writers,
women poets, or perhaps anybody; no more so than James Merrill, say,
represents the far more commonly available poetry of adolescent longing. After
all, one would be far more likely to find an example of late twentieth - century
'representativeness' in any high school yearbook. But that is hardly the point.
And that there have been scores of excellent writers who have been excluded
from the canon for reasons of insidious prejudice is not the point either. What if
Stevens and Whitman really do take Wordsworth as a point of departure? Is it a
claim against the representativeness of Southey's Thalaba or The Curse of
Kehama if we read Whitman against The Prelude, or Stevens against (or
through) Shelley? If Song of Myself makes sense to us partly because of its
peculiar refraction of British Romantic norms, but only as those norms have
been culturally constructed, what are we to do then?
The 'American Counterpoints' section of the Romantic Revolutions collection
further vexes the issue, for, as its four essayists make clear, the notion of
'counterpoint' is available only when a standard is readily identified; the
constructedness of that standard can well be taken as a given, however, without
the complex history of influence and affect being altered, finally, in any
significant way. David Bromwich, Stanley Cavell, Barbara L. Packer, and John
T. Irwin all supply intelligent contributions to the debate over Romantic
continuities; their authors (Emerson, Crane, and other high - canon figures) do
10

certainly prescribe the tradition they work within, but the historicity of such
prescriptions and cultural inventions seems to be taken as a given by all four
critics, one which does not criminalize the literary propensities of their authors.
Similarly, the 'Continuity' section of The Romantics and Us, with contributions
from Louis Simpson, George Bornstein, John Hollander, Robert Pinsky, and
Charles Altieri, might serve to remind us, as Altieri suggests in 'Wordsworth and
the Options for Contemporary American Poetry,' that though there lurks a
dangerous temptation 'to repeat New Critical nostrums about poetry providing
distinctive knowledge about the world, it remains feasible to talk about poems as
establishing significant knowledge about who we can become as speakers and
readers for that world' (197). American Romantic versions of democracy and
self - reliance, and their refraction through the prism of received British
Romantic notions, are still fecund ground for scholarly writing, and these essays
might

serve

as

checks

to

the

current

concern

over

Wordsworth's

'representativeness' - which again, is not to say that Wordsworth is representative

of his age, only that his gigantic shadow will not evaporate in the light of
historical studies of cultural transmission.
Thus it is that Romantic Revolutions actually opens with 'The Spell of
Wordsworth,' a section which is as much a monument to the influence of
Geoffrey Hartman as it is a reassessment of Wordsworth's place in literary
history. As Hartman, Andrzej Warminski, Cynthia Chase, and Donald G.
Marshall make emphatically clear, the deconstructive Wordsworth is not dead highly qualified by political and historical concerns, but still underwriting much
of our thinking about Romanticism. Yet, as Geoffrey Hartman is the first to
remind us, the precise form taken by that politicization is often at odds with our
critical contexts. It is indeed one of the ironies of contemporary criticism,
concerned as it is with quotidian context and the historicity of context, that we
often forget 'that our own occupation as literary scholars working within a
11

university context is as exceptional as poetry itself. The privilege that causes our
concern will not be cancelled by mimic wars against the "aesthetic" element in
art or art theory. Such attacks deny what is strong and peculiar about both art
and art education, and so may be self - scuttling and politically the worst thing to
do' (19). The point here is not that political criticism is potentially the worst
thing to do; rather, the concern is that - precisely from a political point of view monothematic political criminalizations themselves compromise the integrity of
our political commitments.
The 'Critical Reflections' section of Romantic Revolutions sets itself the task of
dealing with the literature of an age under critical assault; most of these essays
bring with them a somewhat defensive tone, and therefore inadvertently take
their place within a tradition of Romantic apologetics. Though much
contemporary criticism announces itself in terms of the grand march of
sophistication, the battle lines duplicate some of the early nineteenth - century
debates over the efficacy of literature with a startling accuracy. Charles Altieri's
impassioned article, 'Wordsworth's Poetics of Eloquence: A Challenge to
Contemporary Theory,' does exactly what its title promises: its analysis of the
rhetoric of eloquence is read as a counter to contemporary claims against the
inherent value of literature, claims that Altieri believes threaten the integrity of
the academy. Whatever Wordsworth's suspect politics, he declares, there is a
genuine 'power' available to be tapped in his poetry: 'The only way 1 know to
bring out the force of Wordsworth's position is to borrow the strategy he used
against Pope, that is, to draw contrasts between the powers that he pursues and
the attitudes toward eloquence which now dominate what Frank Lentricchia
calls "advanced" positions in contemporary literary criticism' (397). And then,
responding to Jonathan Arac's influential book of 1987, Critical Genealogies,
Altieri continues: 'Not to challenge such readings is to submit to a critical
climate in which there is simply no possible positive role for poetic eloquence,
12

and hence little use for the lyric imagination except as a repository for
symptoms or of approved revolutionary emotions' (397).
Altieri's fear seems to be that literature itself has been constructed as the lurking
serpent against which political responsibility militates. Tilottama Rajan similarly
joins the new Romantic apologists, though she is as concerned to salvage the
value of deconstructive hermeneutics as the value of Wordsworth's lyrics.
Brilliantly pinpointing the central drawback of New Historicist readings, she
reminds us: 'If post - structuralism hollows out the lyrical moment, making its
paradoxes into aporias, New Historicism simply accepts the image of
Wordsworth it inherits, situating lyrics as a socially symbolic act of avoidance.'
For Rajan, Wordsworthian understanding is a matter of deconstructive
hermeneutics, in which identity is deconstructed in social, historical terms, and
in which a community of common feelings is clearly thematized.
Don Bialostosky's 'Wordsworth, New Literary Histories, and the Constitution of
Literature' sets itself equally to the task of salvaging value, and therefore equally
to the line of contemporary apologetics that has grown up in response to the
scene of contemporary criminalizations. Bialostosky argues for a vision of
Romanticism which, rather than subverting social action, offers a vision of
empowerment: 'Romantic discourse and Wordsworth's contribution to it should
not be dismissed as a seductive regime that disables us with its addictive and
complacent consolation. Wordsworth's vision of a democracy of active and
disciplined sensibilities, inspired by its poets but not overawed by them, still
retains the power to inform our practices and underwrite our institutions, but the
struggle to realize that vision is only now coming to maturity' (421). M.H.
Abrams's essay on 'Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads' joins the debate, but
from a unique perspective: the Wordsworth against whom recent critics take
issue is very much a Wordsworth of Abrams's invention; the Wordsworth of
Abrams's naturalized supernaturalism is the standard which many recent critics
13

have sought to qualify, and so his critique of Levinson, McGann, and others
carries special resonances. Abrams objects to those political readings which, he
believes, are 'designed to subvert what a poet undertook to say, what his text
seems to say, and what other readers have taken him to say, in order to convert
manifest meanings into a mask, or displacement, or (another of Levinson's
terms) an "allegory" for the real meaning - in this case, a political meaning whose discovery has been reserved for the proponent of the theory' (322). It
would be easy to dismiss Abrams as the mere leftover of a bygone era which
believed that poets were good and true and to be believed; and indeed, the
second part of his essay is devoted to an example of his own approach to
'Tintern Abbey,' one which recalls us to the Abrams of such still magisterial
essays as 'Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.' 'Correcting,' as it
were, new - historicist readings of the poem with his own reading does leave
him somewhat vulnerable, but Abrams does not seem to be particularly
interested in guarding against his own critical vulnerability. Instead, he offers a
statement precisely of the variety which most of us simply could not get away
with, at least not without being identified with the political Right: 'Nor have
political Newreaders avoided the further risk of cancelling the imaginative
delights that works of literature, in their diversity, have yielded to readers of all
eras. For a rigorously political reading is not only a closed, monothematic
reading; it is also joyless, casting a critical twilight in which all poems are gray'
(326). The latter statement, to be sure, could indeed be shot through with holes,
but Abrams is approaching the issue, in fact, on the same note with which
Lindenberger ends: is there a joy to be found in literature which will not make us
sound hopelessly nave or politically suspect? Can we qualify monothematic
political readings without announcing ourselves as fascists out to perpetuate the
status quo? Indeed, in 'Wordsworth and the Options for Contemporary American
Poetry,' Altieri warns that 'purity of ideological critique risks banality of
14

imaginative assertion' (195). The final section of The Romantics and Us volume,
'Culture,' might suggest that we are only just beginning to grasp the relationship
between ideological critique and 'imaginative assertion' (though, to be fair,
'imaginative assertion' is a term which holds very little water with new
historicists). In an interesting essay on Coleridge's 'The Eolian Harp,' Gene
Ruoff calls for a more engaged understanding of another widely demonized
term, belief: 'Modern criticism's avoidance of belief, which often claims its
warrant from Coleridge's own strictly circumscribed "willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," distorts and enervates
the Romantic achievement. The dialogic of a poem like "The Eolian Harp" calls
for an equally dialogical criticism, which is willing both to enter fully into a
work's theological and metaphysical positions and to provide its best reasoned
responses to Coleridge's open invitation, "What if?"' (300). Ann Mellor's essay,
'Why Women Didn't Like Romanticism: The Views of Jane Austen and Mary
Shelley,' seeks to rehabilitate these women by claiming for their works a
pervasive and conscious critique of Romantic norms - or more precisely, it
seems, what have come down to us as Romantic norms. Discussing Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, for example, Mellor 'reads' a thinly masked, allegorical
vilification of the sins of Percy Shelley: 'The failure of the masculine
romanticideology to care for the created product as much as for the creative
process, together with its implicit assumption that the ends can justify the
means, can produce a romanticism that, as Mary Shelley showed, is truly
monstrous' (285 - 6). It is certainly true that the whitewashing of the sins of the
high canon is an offensive affair; nonetheless, quick characterizations of the
'romantic ideology' are precisely what got us into trouble in the first place. What
got us into the business, however, is still the spirit of critical inquiry, one which
is born, presumably, of the delights of critical reading. These texts, whatever the

15

respective bases of their varying polemics, will foster an important and engaged
response to the ethos of Romanticism within contemporary culture.
Footnotes:
(f.1) 'Historical self - consciousness' is one of the God - terms in The Romantic
Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983). For McGann, poems 'are
social and historical products and ... the critical study of such products must be
grounded in a socio - historical analytic' (3; italics mine). He thus suggests that
'any criticism which abolishes the distance between its own (present) setting and
its (removed) subject matter ... will be, to that extent, undermined as criticism'
(30).
(f.2) I refer to recent critiques of the familiar 'spirit of the age' characterizations
of Hazlitt and Shelley, which have been mediated - and promoted - with the
greatest flourish by M.H. Abrams.
(f.3) I am quoting from the fragmentary essay 'On Life,' in Shelley's Poetry and
Prose, ed Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton 1977), 477.
Subject: Book reviews; Literature; History & criticism
Classification: 9172: Canada Publication title: University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume: 62 Issue: 2
Pages: 296-304 Publication date: Winter 1992 Publisher: University of
Toronto Press

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