Romanticisms, Histories, and Romantic Cultures

When I started graduate school, the first day of our class on Romanticism studied the old debate between René Wellek's assertion that Romanticism was a cohesive [End Page 139] phenomenon and A.O. Lovejoy's claim that it was a fragmented one. Lovejoy wrote of Romanticisms, plural. As late as 1989, this was a debate Wellek was assumed to have won. Of course the scene is very different now, as the term is once again under scrutiny. Some critics have followed Jerome McGann's lead and substituted "Romantic Period" as an adjective for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings, making "Romanticism" an historical rather than an aesthetic or philosophical category. Although McGann pointed out that many Romantic-era writers did not subscribe to Romantic ideals, "Romantic period" can add an historicist sheen to the older idea of a Romantic belief-system. And in new historicist criticism, Romantic writing is often presumed to have a unitary approach, though this is a radical political one rather than an ethical, philosophical, or spiritual one. "Romanticism" is still under scrutiny in a way no other periodization is (the October 2001 issue of PMLA contains an impassioned discussion of the term.) Each of the works under review has the word "Romantic" or "Romanticism" in its title and is caught up in the ongoing discussion about the extent to which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultural productions hang together.