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Romanticism and Time

 | 
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
, 
Céline Sabiron

Introduction: The Times of Romanticism

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron

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  • 3 William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, l. 10, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. by D (...)

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.3

  • 4 The conference was held in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French Society for the Study (...)
  • 5 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Lond (...)

1In this volume, we have decided to take Blake’s aphorism as an invitation to see Romantic writing as a ‘production of time’; to look for the work of time within Romantic literature. One of the aims of this collection is to understand Romanticism as the product of its own time, in its ability to reflect history and in the emergence of its specific poetics through time. Blake’s words can also be read as a meditation on poetics unfolding ‘in time’: on poetic form as the product of rhyme and rhythm. Yet, if we attend to the reversibility that characterises Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’, this aphorism also offers a vision of Romanticism as an active ‘production of time’, not only registering the passing of time but also shaping conceptions of time and making history. Romantic writing then also appears as an art of time, creating new representations of temporal phenomena and generating new modes of time-consciousness. The contributions in this collection, which includes a selection of revised papers from the ‘Romanticism and Time’ conference as well as specially commissioned essays,4 are thus held together by the common ambition to study Romantic writing as ‘authentically temporal’:5 as a process in time that displays a form of agency over time.

  • 6 For a wide-ranging, and yet very detailed, introduction to Romantic poetry analysed in its larger s (...)

2This collection explores the ways in which British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time, from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, from William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, to John Clare and Samuel Rogers, raising the question of the evolution of the Romantic canon over time. The presence of poets such as Clare and Rogers, who eluded academia’s field of vision for so long, exposes our own temporal locatedness as academics. It gestures towards the writers who still elude that field of vision and towards those who are surreptitiously drifting out of it. The essays are bound by a common approach to the creative relations Romanticism entertains with the notion of time, with an emphasis on poetry.6 It aims at offering a reflection on the role of poetic writing as a mode of perception of time. The Romantics explored the possibilities opened up by poetry as a form of time, as experiences of time were reflected but also took shape within poetic forms.

  • 7 See for instance Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, I. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1 (...)

3Nevertheless, the scope of this collection is not limited to the realm of poetry. The affinities between temporality and narrative, but also between temporality and the order of reason in essay-writing manifest themselves in the multiple temporalities of prose.7 This is why this volume also looks into the temporalities of Romantic novels and essays, from Mary Shelley to Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Furthermore, some of our contributors were particularly sensitive to the Romantics’ eager exploration of other forms of artistic manipulation of time, and to their tropism towards music in particular, hence the place given to Beethoven’s Fidelio in Section I.

  • 8 See in particular Martin Procházka’s 2005 comparative studies of European, American and Czech Roman (...)
  • 9 Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Ca (...)
  • 10 Percy Shelley, ‘Alastor’, l. 26, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald Reiman and Neil Frais (...)

4Few have attempted to consider the various temporalities of Romanticism as a form of cross-fertilisation between nations, with the notable exception of Martin Procházka, Nicholas Halmi and Paul Hamilton,8 also contributors to this volume. We share their ambition to study the Romantic poetics of history as a European phenomenon. As ‘a literature that represents its own fluid conditions of becoming’,9 Romanticism is also a process in time, constructed by various generations of artists and critics in a complex dynamic of transience and persistence. With the aim of confronting British Romanticism with some of its later European counterparts, some chapters explore the dialogues between Byron and Nietzsche, and between Shelley and Beckett. Challenging the linearity of deterministic conceptions of influence, Romantic texts experiment with creative modes of intertextuality, inventing their origins and imagining their legacies. This volume thus offers a vision of Romanticism as a moment of ‘obstinate questionings’ of the temporalities of literature,10 as its uncanny persistence into later literary movements generates turbulence in the course of traditional literary history.

  • 11 Hamilton, Realpoetik, p. 7.
  • 12 Several recent publications offer a vision of ‘Romanticism as a mode rather than a genre of writing (...)

5In its various instantiations in time and across borders, Romanticism ‘defines itself through a process of self-dissemination which leaves each moment of its instantiation characteristically fragmentary’,11 raising epistemological questions for the field of literary studies and its reliance on periodisation. The proceedings of the roundtable ‘Romanticism and Periodisation’, edited by David Duff, interrogate our critical practices, and fascination for Romantic presences, persistence, and legacies.12 In its ability to bend the course of literary chronologies, Romanticism thus appears as essentially untimely.

  • 13 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Éditio (...)
  • 14 Joel Faflak, ed., Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toron (...)

6This volume looks for Romanticism as a movement out of time: generated by and precipitating the acceleration of history. The close readings here trace the ways in which Romantic ‘time disseminates itself’13 into widely varying scales, paces, and planes, in an age of political, industrial, and epistemological revolutions. Such a ‘vertiginous temporality’14 manifests itself in scalar discrepancies, from the span of a lifetime to unfathomable geological and astronomical sequences, especially in the passage from the timeless and tabular representation of a Linnean nature to the more arrow-like conception of time in pre-evolutionist theories. The emergence of Romanticism corresponds to the moment when geological time and human time collide, ‘as the Anthropocene simultaneously forces human and planetary timescales together and undoes our longstanding belief in the priority of the former over the latter’ (Evan Gottlieb). The experience of time takes varying paces: from the time of agricultural labour embedded in the cycles of nature to the capitalist time of feverish production and constant consumption. The epistemology of time is fragmented into competing paradigms and fields of knowledge, between the poles of Kantian time as an a priori intuition and Newtonian time, with its undifferentiated flow and homogenous course.

  • 15 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and other Essays, ed. and tr (...)
  • 16 Percy Shelley, ‘To a Sky-Lark’, lines 86–87, in Poetry and Prose, p. 306.
  • 17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien’, L’Inactuel, 6 (Fall 1996 (...)
  • 18 Ibid.

7The Romantic poetics of time reflects that dissemination. It bears witness to ‘a disconnection and out-of-jointness’ at work within chronological time.15 Contained in Shelley’s ‘We look before and after, /And pine for what is not—’16 is that sense of an elusive present caught in the constant tension between past and future, between the poles of anamnesis and prophecy. Romantic temporality thus lies in the ‘co-existence of distinct timelines’ (Anne Rouhette) upsetting what Rancière calls ‘the self-coincidence of time’.17 It emerges within the discrepancy between a ‘transformational instant’ (Gregory Dart) and the longue durée of history, within a ‘multiplicity of temporal lines, [with] several senses of time experienced at the “same” time’.18 This multilinear experience takes shape in the tension between the sense of time rooted in ‘the manifold quirks and variations of lived experience’ (Matthew Redmond) and the otherness of non-subjective temporalities. Romantic texts allow for embodied experiences of time to emerge: time fleshes itself out within the ‘body as a temporal medium’ (Oriane Monthéard). Poetic time encounters biological time: the opaque, often undecipherable temporality at work within the human body, its vital rhythms and its course towards ageing and death.

  • 19 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: The University (...)
  • 20 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 40.
  • 21 No page number is indicated for references to the chapters in this volume.
  • 22 Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fo (...)
  • 23 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4, (...)

8Blake’s meditation, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’, challenges the mutual exclusion of the transient and the timeless. Romantic literature has sometimes been seen as cultivating the belief ‘that poetry by its nature can transcend the conflicts and transiences of this time and that place’,19 trying to avoid the wounds of time’s arrow in a tropism towards timelessness. Yet, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, ‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. [...] But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time’.20 Romantic writers endeavour to bring about a new distribution of the transient and the timeless by conferring on poetry a temporality that sees beyond current events and that bears the responsibility of political change. This collection considers the Romantic poetics of time less as a drive towards atemporal transcendence than as the record of a ‘falling into time’ (Ralf Haekel).21 It has chosen to look at Romanticism in time: embedded in time and reflecting on history. The close readings in this volume explore less the historiographical ambitions than the poetics of history in Romantic writing, ‘envisioning anew the role that poetic forms and stylistic techniques play […] in the way Romantic literature engages with history’.22 Our aim is not to see Romantic poems as merely reactive to the course of events, but as creative engagements with history in the making. Romanticism was immersed in its own time, yet not passively so, inventing ‘new modes of historical consciousness’ and making history.23

  • 24 Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Poetry and Prose, p. 535.
  • 25 Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 18.

9Rather than investigating the Romantic poetics of history as a memorial art, this volume focuses on what ‘permits the private space of the self entrance into those monumental moments recorded by, and for, history’ (Mark Sandy). In the same way, the Romantic ambition to attend to the ‘shadows which futurity casts upon the present’24 is seen in this book as part of an endeavour to change the course of events. In the words of Ian Balfour, ‘Prophecy is a call and a claim much more than it is a prediction, a call oriented toward a present that is not present’.25 In the politics of Romanticism, prophecy is part of the will to shape the present: to liberate the efficacy of poetry and set the forces of history in motion.

  • 26 Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge an (...)

10That ability to envision futurity takes place in a moment of latency, as it awakens new political aspirations. According to Richard Eldridge, that moment, in between the promise of advent and indefinite deferral, is the temporality of political freedom: ‘This sense of simultaneous direction toward and deferral of the achievement of freedom accounts for the predominance in Romantic writing of remembrance and anticipation rather than of present statement of the features of things’,26 revealing the political import of the Romantic poetics of time. The Romantics’ conception of futurity involves their commitment to envision the future in a dark present. In the words of Paul Hamilton, Romantic writing reveals ‘the interwoven quality of the future in past and present’.

  • 27 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 52.
  • 28 Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (...)
  • 29 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 53.

11The Romantic poetics of time thus transforms time from the inside, upsetting chronologies, introducing loops and detours, shaking the foundations of a ‘temporal economy […] of the sort implied in the concept of linear time’ (Laura Quinney). Taking an active part in the ‘essential dishomogeneity’ of its times,27 Romanticism refracts rather than merely reflects time. The Romantic poetics of time also redistributes origins and aftermaths when posterity becomes a driving force and a process of origination: ‘For the Romantics, […] posterity is not so much what comes after poetry as its necessary prerequisite—the judgement of future generations becomes the necessary condition of the act of writing itself’.28 Romantic poetics thus open up various lines of time, disjointing and combining temporal layers within the play of literary language: ‘dividing and interpolating time, [the poet] is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times’.29 In order to attend to time in the making in Romantic texts, this volume looks into their ability to interweave various lines of time.

  • 30 Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Act III, scene iii, lines 80–81, in Poetry and Prose, p. 261.

12Romanticism is sometimes seen as dismissive of a clockwork conception of time that divides the continuum of temporal experience into a series of discrete units. Romantic poetics consists less in the rejection of quantifiable and linear time than in the subversion of its homogeneity based on the return of identical units. The Romantic poetics of time introduces difference within patterns of repetition, when poetic rhythm creates other forms of periodicity. Hence the swirling movement guiding the breath of the Spirit of the Hour in Prometheus Unbound: ‘Thou breathe into the many-folded Shell, /Loosening its mighty music’.30 The breath of the Spirit of the Hour turns into a melody within the spiral structure of the conch. In Shelley’s spiral vision of time, poetry emerges at the exact same time as the advent of a swerve or swirl, as the emergence of an open circular movement within the shell. That spiral motion manifests itself as a strain between reminiscence and prophecy:

  • 31 Ibid.

PROMETHEUS […]
[Turning to the Spirit of the Hour.]
For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione,
Give her that curved shell, which Proteus old
Made Asia’s nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.31

13The shell, given long ago by ‘Proteus old’, is a convoluted form bearing within itself the depths of time. The trochaic inversions at the onsets of the segments ‘Give her that curved shell’ and ‘breathing within it’ seem to invert the stress pattern for a spell of time before the iambic rhythm reasserts itself. They introduce a form of reversibility within the flow, offering a synthesis of linear and circular lines of time, a movement embodied by the motif of the spiral. As a remembrance and a promise intricately weaved into the rhythms of poetry, the voice contained within the shell points to the Romantic art of subverting the course of representation. It tells of the way Romantic poetics complicates the temporality of mimesis, in which the model is supposed to come before the work. In Shelley’s temporal spiral, poetry is mimetic of the future it envisions.

  • 32 This is a reference to De Quincey’s ‘involutes’ in Suspiria de Profundis, in Lindop, Grevel, ed., T (...)
  • 33 Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, p. 39, our translation.

14Poetry comes first, and intimates the advent of what it longs for: the anticipation contained within a distant memory. In the Romantic poetics of intimation, the future is contained within the past and the past will blossom in the future. Romantic poetics reveals its apprehension of the delicate fabric of time in transformative moments. Indeed, these involutes32 can be traced in the political concepts of revolution and restoration which, in the words of Paul Hamilton, offer ‘this future-rich understanding of the past in the present’. The collision of several temporalities ‘compose rhythms whose tempi are out of joint’.33 It consists in an act of composition in the musical sense. The Romantic poetics of time introduces a swerve in the structure of time, generating ripples and lapses. It derives its specific rhythm from the constant disjointing and interweaving of several temporal threads. The Romantic art of incipience, when the shell is about to ‘loos [en] its mighty music’, reawakens the force of the potential. It gestures toward that inchoate moment when the pen is about to touch the page. That moment of temporisation is an act of composition that interweaves actuality and potentiality. At that instant, textual potentialities—all the poems that might have been—dissolve before the poem that emerges. And yet, they somehow survive the moment of writing, vibrating in the background of the actual poem, generating alternative strata of time, embracing all its pasts, presents and futures.

15Section I, ‘Restoration, Revival, and Revolution across Romantic Europe’, studies the way Romanticism developed at different moments and within different cultures in Europe. Paul Hamilton’s chapter, ‘Future Restoration’, lays the stress on the crucial importance of ‘restoration’, rather than ‘revolution’ (and its French historical representation, which has already been the subject of many a critical study), for English Romantics, in particular Blake and Wordsworth. They resorted to it creatively in their quest for a continuum between past, present and future, and through their grasp of both temporality and literature across Europe. The Romantics’ skill at unearthing a political imagery matching their perception of time is further developed in Evan Gottlieb’s essay on ‘Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry’. In the Romantic era, this sense of a human temporal continuity—partly based on the impression of a permanent imperishable natural world on which humanity relies and as conveyed by Wordsworth’s poetry—is yet questioned by the rapid technological and industrial transformations and the geopolitical disturbances induced by the Napoleonic Wars. Wordsworth’s younger British contemporaries, especially Keats, P.B. Shelley and Byron, thus came up with alternative temporalities, four of which are traced back in the chapter. The Romantics’ self-reflexivity on their own historicity is eventually examined through a close-up on lyrical art and the way classical music, and particularly Beethoven’s operatic paean to freedom, Fidelio, interacts with and has an impact on the history of the period. Gregory Dart’s piece reflects on the various versions of the opera as ‘instances of a shifting political-historical consciousness’ and as a string of distinct but related “spots of time”, an allegory of history. He shows how music is gradually subjected to the pressures of real and historical times, and how timing becomes the political virtue of the future. The first section, dealing with the way poetry and the arts, especially music, are progressively shaped by historical events in the Romantic period, leads to a more subjective and intimate approach to time.

16Section II focuses on the ‘Romantic Conceptions of Time’ as it is felt and experienced. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of time as developed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ralf Haekel investigates the temporality of the soul in William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’ and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. To him they both convey a much bleaker vision and even disillusioned picture of the nature of time and history than is usually agreed upon by critics like Helen Vendler, Michael O’Neill, James Chandler, and Jerome McGann, to quote but a few recent examples. Longing for an eternity that seems forever gone, the poets yet depict time as fleeting and transient. This perception of time coincides with the shift from an essentially eternal conception to a temporal and thereby finite concept of human nature. Byron’s epic, mirroring the hero’s walking in a disenchanted world echoes Keats’s perception of time as discussed by Oriane Monthéard in the following chapter. Taking a walking tour of Scotland in the summer of 1818, the poet got the chance to harmoniously connect with temporality. Wishing to break away from the constraints of the ordinary measurement of time, as he recorded in his letters, Keats ended up experiencing a fictionalised temporality through picturesque tourism when he visited the landscape with a literary gaze, thus following the tracks of other poets. Past and present merged through the poet’s physical act of walking on a ground pervaded with memories, while he also felt much more anchored in his own time. This redefinition of a more personal take on time needs studying and theorising; hence the following section dedicated to the poetics of time.

17Section III, entitled ‘The Poetics of Time’, considers the work of time and the uneasy tension, in Lily Dessau’s chapter, between natural-and man-made time (the mechanical church clock), simultaneously tracked across the cyclical recurring of seasons and the daily schedule of a farm labourer busy with various agricultural tasks in John Clare’s extended work The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Dessau contrasts these temporal variations and progressions with what happens in the ‘May’ poem in which, she says, ‘Clare keeps us perpetually trapped in the present, denying access to the narrated past of custom and tradition’. Through a close-reading analysis of the poem, she underlines the cuts in the published version when compared to the manuscript, thus metafictionally questioning the role played by both editors and patrons in these compressions and contractions. The acceleration of time, as also enabled by the development of print and the accompanying industrialisation, is further discussed by Matthew Henry Redmond in his chapter on two landmark essayists, the British Charles Lamb and the American Washington Irving, presented as combative antiquarians in a world of machines and breakneck speed. They both advocate reading as a way to exercise one’s critical judgment and to escape from their age’s most pressing and irrational controversies. If promoting reading and antiquarianism may at first sound anachronistic in the Romantic era, so do Victor’s alchemical pursuits in Frankenstein. In her chapter dedicated to Mary Shelley’s novel, Anne Rouhette shows how the book brings forward at least two approaches to time: historical and mythical. Yet, instead of contrasting them, it tries to superimpose or even merge them through the precarious, uneasy cohabitation of the linear and the cyclical, thereby demonstrating that chronological disorder and anachronism can be used to poetical ends. This creative handling of time in literature and its effect on both the diegesis and the reader raises questions pertaining to the field of reception studies.

18Section IV, ‘Persistence and Afterlives’ turns to Romantic legacies and the way Romantics, like Shelley and his last poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, have paradoxically served as a source of inspiration for twentieth-century authors like Beckett, as demonstrated by Laura Quinney in her comparative study of the two writers. Her chapter, entitled ‘Heaps of Time in Beckett and Shelley’, undoes the difference between speed— as seemingly conceptualised in Shelley’s poem that stages the Chariot of Life hurtling forward on its destructive course and figuring the overwhelming momentum of time—and vacancy, as embodied by Beckett’s characters who feel entrapped in a time that never runs out, but perpetually runs on and in slow motion, up to the point when it becomes static, as if they had become prisoners of a purgatorial temporality. Mark Sandy eventually spirits the readers of this volume away to Venice, a place presented as both real, through its distinctive architecture and key historical sites, all rooted in time, but also mythical, thanks to the juxtaposition of several timelines and the creative intertwining of personal memories. This fanciful and yet genuine Italian cityscape is central to the poetics of atemporality in Byron and Shelley. It seems to be a welcome and just allegory of the way Romantic writing creates its own sense of time, in its own terms. Like the city that is a perpetually charmed spot and broken spell for Byron and Shelley, the movement appears as essentially untimely through its ability to bend the course of time and to persist beyond the so-called Romantic period.

19Co-written by David Duff, Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Stafford, Martin Procházka, and Laurent Folliot, the closing section, entitled ‘Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable’, explores the problem of literary periodisation in Romanticism. It is a vast, and yet little-studied issue in the literary field that becomes the specific focus of this forum, whose formal difference results from its dynamic interplay of voices and standpoints. It offers a qualified overview of the various attempts at defining the period by both contemporaries and later generations, and stresses the main characteristics of Romanticism in terms of keywords, timelines and perspectives, whose differences are induced by a new historical awareness at the turn of the eighteenth century. While it reopens the methodological issue of periodisation in literary history, it also broadens it by subtly highlighting cross-border differences, be they regional or transnational, with a reference to European or even Transatlantic Romanticism. This concluding debate, edited by David Duff, questions the effectiveness of the concept of the ‘Romantic period’ to approach literary history, and its aptness to reflect the multiple distinctions and nuances within Romantic literature.

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Notes

3 William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, l. 10, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. by David Erdman (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 36.

4 The conference was held in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism and by the Universités de Lille and Lorraine, with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France.

5 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 206.

6 For a wide-ranging, and yet very detailed, introduction to Romantic poetry analysed in its larger social, cultural, geographical and political contexts, see Fiona Stafford, Reading Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118228104

7 See for instance Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, I. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1983) and Jacques Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

8 See in particular Martin Procházka’s 2005 comparative studies of European, American and Czech Romanticism in Romantismus a romantismy (Romanticism and Romanticisms), ed. by Martin Procházka and Zdeněk Hrbata (Nakladatel: Karolinum, 2005); Nicholas Halmi’s The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212415.001.0001, in which he pointed at the interrelation between German philosophically-minded Romanticists and English poets like Wordsworth or Shelley in their wish to re-enchant the world; and Paul Hamilton, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686179.001.0001

9 Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511720031

10 Percy Shelley, ‘Alastor’, l. 26, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 74.

11 Hamilton, Realpoetik, p. 7.

12 Several recent publications offer a vision of ‘Romanticism as a mode rather than a genre of writing’ (The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, ed. by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 1, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203110096), thus partly freeing Romanticism from periodisation. See also Michael O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.001.0001, Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Mark Sandy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606958, and Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315243917

13 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000), p. 43, our translation.

14 Joel Faflak, ed., Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 14, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442699595

15 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and other Essays, ed. and trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 39–54 (p. 40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503600041-004

16 Percy Shelley, ‘To a Sky-Lark’, lines 86–87, in Poetry and Prose, p. 306.

17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien’, L’Inactuel, 6 (Fall 1996), 53–68 (p. 67), our translation.

18 Ibid.

19 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 69.

20 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 40.

21 No page number is indicated for references to the chapters in this volume.

22 Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 15, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt175x2fs

23 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511519437

24 Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Poetry and Prose, p. 535.

25 Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 18.

26 Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 21.

27 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 52.

28 Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511484100

29 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 53.

30 Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Act III, scene iii, lines 80–81, in Poetry and Prose, p. 261.

31 Ibid.

32 This is a reference to De Quincey’s ‘involutes’ in Suspiria de Profundis, in Lindop, Grevel, ed., Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English-Opium Eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 104.

33 Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, p. 39, our translation.

Author(s)

Université de Lille and Institut Universitaire de France. Univ. Lille, ULR 4074— CECILLE—Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Lettres Etrangères, F-59000 Lille, France and Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).

Université de Lorraine. Univ. Lorraine, UR 2338—IDEA—Interdisciplinarité Dans les Études Anglophones, F-54000 Nancy.

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