From: Onno Oerlemans, University of Ottawa
RE: Mellor-Matlak
I've just received my examination copy of Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak's "British Literature: 1780-1830." It really is wonderful, almost exactly what I've been hoping for over the past five years. At last we can teach the women poets along side the men without apologizing for the inadequacy of the selections. Now if I could only convince my department to allow me to turn the "romanticism" course into a two-semester affair.
I have two questions inspired by browsing through the book this morning. First, is it available in a more affordable paperback version? Many of my students are not going to pay $71 Canadian for a text, no matter how good I tell them it is. They'll struggle along with the Norton and miss exactly those new texts I'm most excited about.
Second, I'd like to hear ideas about how people are going to cope with the embarrassment of riches in the new anthology. There is now enough material for a two-Year course in the period formerly known as romanticism (couldn't we come up with a hieroglyph for this new period?). Every year I add an author or two, and every year I have to drop texts that I used to think were essential. This year, I dropped all of Blake, and Wordsworth's "Michael" and the "Intimations Ode," among other things. With Mellor's text one could now happily assign ambitious essay topics allowing students to explore uncovered authors on their own, and much can be assigned as background reading that is not explicitly covered in class. Even so, there are dozens of great (essential?) poems that NEED discussing, that most students just will not grasp without some in-class guidance. Have any of you come up with strategies for covering the diversity of the period that you feel happy with?
Thanks for any help.
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From Eugene Stelzig, State University of New York, Geneseo
RE: the one-semester Romanticism quandary:
The canon expands, but the semester doesn't. I've taught the one-semester course at our college (offered only once every two years) by doing the traditional six from Blake to Keats, supplemented by selections from Dorothy W.'s journals, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and some prose selections from Hazlitt and DeQuincey. Next fall, I want to begin to add some of the newly recovered women writers (beginning with Mary Robinson, some of whose poetry I scanned and was impressed by on the Web). But I certainly don't want to eliminate any of my currently assigned readings, and I also doubt my department would go for (the obvious) solution of a two-semester British Romanticism sequence. So I too ask in considerable perplexity, what is one to do?
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From Ken Johnston, Indiana University
RE: Mellor-Matlak
Surely one always makes selections in any offering of the usual one-semester undergrad romanticism course? And if different faculty teach it, the students get different selections. And one would get tired of teaching the same selections all the time, even without new anthologies and rediscovered writers. So, without minimizing the obvious problems of inclusion and coverage, we could re-phrase our new situation not as a problem but as an opportunity: more texts available to select *from.* And a fuller anthology like the Mellor-Matlak will automatically enable us to make the point to our students that *all* courses and all anthologies and all literary history involves selectivity. My starting question is to ask them, "What is the name of the literary/cultural period we are currently living in?"
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From Ted Underwood, Cornell University
RE: Mellor, Matlak, and the Ante-Blake
I would be very glad to hear attempts at an answer to Bruce Graver's question: "3. When Blake fought his way into Romanticism surveys, he displaced something that was well-entrenched. Can anyone remind us what it was that Blake edged out?"
That question leads naturally into a further question I would also like to hear answered. Let's call it 3a.
3a) Does it seem to anyone else that the *terminus ab quo* of our period has been steadily moving back into the eighteenth century? It seems to me that there was a time when people assumed that Romanticism was a term strictly for things after _Lyrical Ballads_. (Though I could be wrong about that; people with longer memories, help us out.) But 1789 has also become a popular starting date, perhaps because, if you're going to take Blake seriously, you have to include the whole decade of the 1790s. McGann's recent anthology begins in 1785, though, and Mellor-Matlak begins in 1780; both moves are probably reflections of the fact that these critics take Della Cruscan and Unitarian poets of the 1780s more seriously than they have been taken for a long while. Am I wrong that these developments are relatively new?
If it sticks, this chronological stretching of the period will, in itself, force us to redefine what we mean by Romanticism. I'll put my cards on the table and confess that I'm rather in favor of it, because I find texts from the late eighteenth-century fascinating, because it's a neglected period, and because I think there's a significant continuity with later Romantic texts.
But there's and interesting institutional corollary. People like myself and other grad students I know who have been trying to prepare ourselves to understand the whole period from, say, 1770 to 1835, are a bit nonplussed when we run up against a job market that often (at smaller schools) still divides into Restoration-and-Eighteenth-Century on the one hand and Nineteenth-Century on the other. I would be tremendously pleased for selfish reasons to see these tectonic plates realign themselves, so that I don't find myself straddling a fault—although I don't expect them to.
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FROM: Susan Wolfson, Princeton University
RE: Dating Romanticism
For reasons I won't go into, I've just been looking at this question in terms of anthologies. The 1798 determines Lyrical Ballads—and things usually go forward with a halt at the first Reform Bill. But Russell Noyes's anthology, the standard before Perkins, begins with Thompson's Seasons (1725 or so) and threads forward to the 1840s. To include the 1790s of course takes the French Revolution as some sort of marker and it's not just to include Blake, but also Barbauld, Wollstonecraft, Hays, Radcliffe, Robinson, and hey, why not, Boswell's Life of Johnson. In looking at the Oxford "period" anthologies (were these what was in use before Noyes? or were separate editions for each author used?), there is "Regency Verse." Mellor and Matlak polemically avoid the R-word (Romanticism, that is), and so are free to define whatever half century they want, within which the literature that has defined "Romanticism" is a vital but not the only presence. It's interesting to me that they were able to convince Harcourt Brace to forgo "Romanticism" in their title, since I know that publishers are keenly committed to keeping their anthologies keyed to how most courses are listed in course announcements.
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From Onno Oerlemans, University of Ottawa
It's interesting that so many of us find real pleasure in erasing boundaries, and not just those as defined by the 'romantic ideology,' but of the time frame of the period itself. It certainly is more exciting to teach a course when we can, as most of us do, change the syllabus every year, representing the diversity we wallow in not so much in any single course, but over the history of the course in our lifetime as teachers.
Yet it is also true that most of our students crave exactly the kind of order (call it narrative structure or ideology) that we are busy undermining. I feel pretty comfortable doing this with individual works, suggesting multiple readings, but I am far less comfortable doing this with the course as a whole. After all, I suppose most of us have had the comfort of courses in Romanticism in which it was not only defined for us, but also shown to consist of a relatively fixed canon (even if that canon had in fact been changing through the century). We are perhaps rebelling against the artifice of that fixity now with our delight over the complexity of the new anthologies.
I want in my own course both to give a sense of the apparent unity of the old canon, to let students know what texts people have been talking about for 2 centuries, and to see that other literature around it which has been ignored. This other canon is examined both in its own right, and to set romanticism in relief. The problem I continually confront is, as I suggested earlier, how to do both adequately. I drop Blake this year, feeling vaguely comforted by the fact that I can skip someone else next year. But what about that class of 40 people who perhaps never read Blake? Mixing and matching from year to year makes us feel adept, but how do we define our duty to our students? Periodization is probably not the answer. If we were to define ourselves each as covering 2 centuries or 2 national literatures, then perhaps we could feel better organizing courses explicitly around ideas, or genres. Maybe we should abandon the very concept of a survey as doomed to create more problems than it solves, and make each course an 'intensive' examination of some idea, author, conflict, etc. . . . , which would at least leave students with something other than bewilderment by the end of the term.
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From Ken Johnston, Indiana University
RE: Dating Romanticism
One anthology everybody should look at in this matter is that edited by Arthur Symons in 1909, called The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. It starts with John Home (1722-1808) and ends, 87 entries later!, with Thomas Hood (1799-1845)—and then has a last chapter on "The Minors," which includes another 59 names! In short, just about 150 names. (Actually it's not an anthology but a sort of literary facts encyclopedia.) I use this Table of Contents as a starting point in my grad seminars on "new" writers in the 1790s—because of course Barbauld, Smith, Robinson, etc. are all included, and a couple of dozen other writers, even in the "main" contents, whom I have (still) never heard of. One assignment is to send students out to discover their "new" Romantic writer of the week.
Of course, this book goes to the opposite extreme/error, of including just about everybody who wrote a poem during the era, so its "Romantic Movement" is suspect from the point of view of over-inclusiveness. But it certainly does work, like my opening question to undergrads ("What's *our* cultural period called?") to expose the constructedness of all period definitions—among which, when you come to think of it, "Romantic" is one of the strangest.
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From Alan Richardson, Boston College
Like Bruce Graver, I have a few old anthologies on hand, and now I know at last what I've been saving them for.
As Bruce Graver points out, the older anthologies look uncannily like the newer ones in many ways—more authors, more genres, a longer time frame, a more "democratic" approach to the canon. So when a lot of Blake is added, a lot of little things get cut—some "minor" writers, some Lamb essays, the "pre-Romantic" selections (like what, from my few examples, looks like the standard 10 pages of Cowper), etc.
But, in answer to Bruce Graver's earlier question, if there's any one big loser when the Blake section gets seriously beefed up in the 60s, it's Walter Scott (as a poet). There are approximately 130 pages of Blake in the '67 Perkins, and about 10 of Scott. But in the 1950 edition of Woods's anthology, "almost the same" as the 1916 edition save for "a large number" (?) of Blake selections, there are still only 32 pages of Blake and 40 of Scott. In Bernbaum's 1948 edition of his 1929 anthology, there are 23 pages of Blake and 65 pages of Scott. We need a much larger sampling, of course, but it would seem that Scott was displaced as the sixth Romantic poet by Blake, who then went on to garner a greater share of the anthologies than Scott ever had, to the detriment of a "minor" writer here, a Hunt essay there.
In relation to how changes like this filter down to the secondary school level, I note that my father (who would have turned 16 in 1940) can still recite lots of Walter Scott lines, and I've heard others now in their 70s speak of how large Scott loomed in their secondary educations. My 7th-grade teacher (this would have been 1968 or 69) had us memorize the 16 lines from "Lay of the Last Minstrel" beginning "Breathes there a man with soul so dead," which seems to have been a standard recitation piece. But that 16 lines were all the Scott we knew—and all we needed to know?
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From Robert J. Griffin, Tel Aviv University
RE: The Long Latter Eighteenth Century
The answer to Bruce Graver's question about what Blake displaced may possibly be Cowper. Remember that Coleridge in *Biographia Literaria* thought of his own era as "from Cowper to the Present." I also recall a passage in Richard Ohmann's book on English in America where he cites a 19th-century American syllabus that began the romantic period with Cowper. A little later, however, one can find literary historians such as Henry Beers's *A History of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century* (1898) focusing on what would shortly be defined as "pre-romantic" writers. Lovejoy, Wellek, and, following them, Harold Bloom all refer to the beginnings of "romanticism" as occurring in the 1740s with Joseph and Thomas Warton and Collins and Gray. I have also seen anthologies from the first half of the 20th century that include these authors as well.
The positive characteristics of "romanticism" are notoriously difficult to define; Lovejoy began with this problem, and Wellek, in my view, fudged it by synthesizing differences out of existence. But what everyone seems to have agreed on is that "romantic" can be opposed to "classic" and in many formulations has been opposed to "the 18th century." If what you discover is that much of what one wants to define as "romantic" actually takes place within the 18th century, or alternatively, within the cultural contexts established in the 18th century, you may have to re-conceptualize as Ted Underwood has reasoned.
What this exposes is the way "romantic" is more conceptual than it is chronological. Let's say we accept the 1790s as important; then why not study Boswell's *Life of Johnson* (1791, with its opening hit at French philosophy), as Susan Wolfson suggests? Boswell has been ignored as not pertinent just the way Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson were although for different specific reasons. Actually, probably the most immediate, lively, first-hand information about James Lowther, the first Earl of Lonsdale, comes from Boswell. Boswell courted Lonsdale's patronage hoping to be a candidate for English Parliament in Lonsdale's district. In Boswell's experience, Lonsdale was a thoroughly unreliable and despicable character (see *The English Experiment 1785-1789*). It is all there in lengthy detail. This is the period, of course, when Wordsworth was in his late teens, and the same Lonsdale owed him money. Concepts of what is "romantic" and what is "18th century," however, would not lead us to look for information that may be pertinent to Wordsworth in Boswell's journals.
I, too, am pleased that these boundaries are being challenged. I want to suggest that any analysis of periodization needs to recognize the interplay between chronological and conceptual (or alternatively, diachronic and synchronic) elements. The diachronic element is that which structures its object by means of a narrative of beginnings and endings. If the current institutional structures are inhibiting, I can only urge people to try to come up with creative solutions. I have been fortunate in that I have gradually been able to convince the people who make these decisions that I am useful to them if I offer courses in the "period" 1660-1832. This semester I am teaching a seminar on Byron and Shelley and an advanced course on 18th-century women writers (beginning with A. Behn). Next year, among other things, I will be offering a graduate seminar on theoretical approaches to *The Prelude* and and undergraduate seminar on Johnson and Boswell.
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From Eugene Stelzig, State University of New York, Geneseo
RE: Mellor-Matlak Anthology
Ken Johnston, thanks for your commonsensical suggestions about the one-semester romanticism course as an "opportunity"; as for your (teasing?) question about the name of the literary cultural period we are living in, well, you know as well as the rest of us what our colleagues in contemporary lit and culture tell us: the postmodern age. To give that period or culture a truer designation (or a more revealing or provocative one) would presumably take a spirit like Nietzsche's, probing yet playful. How about the age or the commercial culture of instant celebrity? (O.k., I know Warhol is not Nietzsche.) "Every philosophy also hides a philosophy, every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask."
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From Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
Have I missed mention of Burns as chief claimant to have been covered by the cherub Blake? I'd conjecture, without benefit of anthological research, that Big Blake (prophetic books) crowded out Scott, but Lyric Blake outsang Burns. Bad news for Scotland in either case?
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From Mary Lynn Johnson, University of Iowa
RE: Canon Displacement / the one-semester Romanticism quandary
The big loser in Blake's rise to "standard" status was Scott (the poems, especially). I remember the exact moment it happened, in a sophomore survey class, when my teacher (a Chaucerian who had taken up New Criticism), turned the page to give the next assignment, something by Scott, buried his face in his hands, and said "I just can't go through these another year—skip ahead to Byron."
Our upper-level undergraduate Romantics course used Bernbaum's anthology, which featured the Big Five, with a sampling of Blake and Burns as Pre-Romantics, and a good bit of Beddoes, Hood, some Leigh Hunt, and maybe a bit of John Clare. Although our teacher confided that there were really Six "major Romantic poets," he pled the time constraints of a quarter-length course and left Blake as a warm-up to the Big Five. Although he said nothing at all about gender, he also had us read (and write impromptu in-class essays on) *Emma* and *Wuthering Heights.*
At Tulane, however, where I went to graduate school (late '50s, early '60s), Richard Harter Fogle taught a one-semester course in the Romantics, the content of which alternated from year to year between Blake-Wordsworth-Coleridge and Byron-Shelley-Keats. So it was possible to take one set for credit and audit the other set. At Georgia State University I was able to teach a two-quarter undergraduate course in the Romantics and a three-quarter graduate sequence. (A predecessor there had expanded the graduate-level Romantic offerings by concocting a third-quarter course on "Blake and Byron," a combo I actually came to like very much.)
Yes, it takes time, but don't be discouraged—courses really do change as faculty members change. But hang onto the Intimations Ode—I'm with the curmudgeons on that one!
P.S. The reason I had to cover so much ground in my 140-page chapter on Blake in Frank Jordan's 4th edition of *The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism* (1985) was that Blake had been left out of the 3 previous "Big Five" editions; as his stature rose in the 1950s, Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens sneaked him into their companion MLA volume on then-minor figures such as M.W. Shelley and Hazlitt, *The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism* (1957; rev. 1966). I realized how thoroughly everything has changed when our 18-year old son, after hearing me utter a male pronoun with reference to "Shelley," said: "But Mom, Shelley was a woman!"
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From Stephen Behrendt, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
RE: Mellor-Matlak
It occurs to me that the new anthology really does open up entirely new possibilities for us in many respects. Of course, this collection is not limited to poetry, nor even to poetry and "fiction," which does an immediate service to those of us wishing to examine with our students the ways in which topics cross traditional genre boundaries.
I also think that we get a delicious irony here. There are a great many really inexpensive paperback versions of the canonical authors in print now; one can get a W Wordsworth or a PB Shelley for class use for only a couple dollars, and the new Dover Thrift editions are only $1 apiece. Now we have the chance to live with the reverse of what we used to have: an anthology that at last recognizes and incorporates into a "main" (hardbound) text some of those writers traditionally excluded—AND the need to get the canonicals in via "supplementary" paperbounds or even copies turned out in packets or in the back room. Interesting turnabout—not that I think turnabout is the issue. But in terms of the long-standing symbolism of "books" as opposed to "handouts" and "paperbacks," this does create interesting possibilities.
As far as the business of dates, dating, and periodization, I think it's time we think more seriously about what the Romantic mindset or ethos IS (or, more accurately, what those mindsetS ARE) and worry less about a Romantic "period." That will enable us to think more reasonably about the Romantic aspects of Shakespeare, Woolf, or Gary Snyder, which might prove liberating for all of us. Surely the Romantics thought much of what they thought, felt, and advocated to be timeless rather than timebound.
Just a couple random thoughts for a Friday morning from one who looks forward to trying the new anthology in a variety of contexts.
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FromRobert J. Griffin, Tel Aviv University
RE: Dating Romanticism
What I take from William Levine's observations on the apparent contradiction in Coleridge's versions of literary history in *Biographia Literaria* is that this is an excellent example of why critics should be suspicious of literary histories arranged according to epochs understood as constituting decisive breaks. One antidote to that kind of thinking is to consider genres and their transformations; luckily, I think for us, this has been done splendidly by Stuart Curran in "Poetic Form and British Romanticism."
A footnote on Bowles: he was the student of Thomas Warton at Oxford and before that of Joseph Warton at Winchester. When Coleridge refers to uniting the head and the heart, he is actually alluding to, echoing, citing from Joseph Warton's *Essay on Pope.*(3)
I think a possible reply to Stephanie Friedman about Cowper is that one often selects writers for historical reasons rather than aesthetic ones. Cowper's role in making blank verse viable seems to me important. And, of course, since Humphrey House's book on Coleridge (1962), the passage in *The Task* (Book IV, "A Winter Evening") that lies behind Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" has been available and makes a very effective class. When students react by accusing Coleridge of plagiarism, one can reply by saying that originality lies not in inventing every detail but often in the *use* that is made of materials at hand.
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