How does canonical Romanticism
constitute its "others," and to what extent has the category "British
Romanticism" resisted wholesale incorporation of these "others,"
even in a period of widespread canon revision? In pursuing these questions,
I find myself in fundamental agreement with Laura Mandell, who analyzes the
resistance of British Romanticism to fundamental change in her recent essay
"Canons Die Hard," remarking in passing on the "unconscious"
kind of canonizing that goes on in the heads both of anthologists and of the
classroom teachers for whom they anthologize. However, I wish to pursue the
notion of an "unconscious" sort of canonizing in a quite different
manner, drawing on the growing body of research that seeks to elucidate our
largely nonconscious repertoire of scripts and models, concepts and categories.
Discussions of how British Romanticism has conventionally been defined and
delimited have made surprisingly little use of the large body of research
and theory on categorization and cognition that has appeared over the past
twenty-five years, and yet a cognitive approach may have much to tell us about
the endurance of canonical British Romanticism and the manner in which canon
revision—at least in relation to this field—has tended to proceed.
Cognitive categorization theory departs decisively
from the classical notion of firmly bounded categories based on necessary
and sufficient criteria, as well as from the structuralist variation of the
classical approach that emphasizes binary oppositions within a self-contained
semiotic system. (1) The cognitive approach builds
instead upon Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblance" categories,
predicated not on universally shared criteria but instead on a "complicated
network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing," allowing for
category members that may have no elements in common but that each overlap
with certain other "examples." Wittgenstein displaces the all or
nothing demand of the classical approach with a tolerance for fuzzy boundaries
or, as he puts it in Philosophical Investigations, "blurred edges."
(2) Cognitive theorists like Eleanor Rosch and
George Lakoff seek in addition to account for the predominantly "automatic
and unconscious" human tendency to base categories on "prototypical
examples" or "cognitive reference points," such that (in contradistinction
to the classical view) some members of a category will strike category users
as "better" examples than others. (3) This tendency has been replicated using artificial neural network
learning programs and has been empirically demonstrated in human subjects
many times and across numerous cultures (though the categories themselves,
as opposed to the mode of categorization, remain culture-specific). English
speakers in the U.S. will consistently choose a robin as a "better"
or more prototypical example of a bird than, say, a vulture or a turkey (not
to mention a penguin); a chair or table will reliably seem a better example
of the category "furniture" than a chest or a lamp.
A Wittgensteinian "family resemblance"
approach to the category "British Romanticism" resolves a number
of the seeming dilemmas that have plagued attempts to define Romanticism over
the years. It allows us to see Romanticism in terms of shared features which
are distributed unevenly over the field, rather than necessary conditions
that must be present in a given work or author. Blake and Keats need not have
a great deal, or much of anything, in common—so long as the writings of each
manifests generic or stylistic or thematic features that significantly overlap
with other writers in the category. (My youngest sister may not look at all
like my older brother, but if they both, in their different ways, take after
my mother, the "family resemblance" holds). We could readily list
a number of such features conventionally associated with British Romanticism
(drawing freely on attempts, such as Wellek's, to classically define the category)
without insisting on necessary or universally shared characteristics, a pointless
task as by now we all know. (4) What is more, a
"family resemblance" approach enables us to account for a fair amount
of "fuzziness" at the edges of the category, such that an author
like Robert Burns or George Crabbe or Emily Bronte need not be placed definitively
within (or outside of) Romanticism: Romanticism and its others need not be
placed in a mutually exclusive binary relation. This fuzziness or blurring
at the boundaries means as well that we don't need to engage in turf wars
with our colleagues in eighteenth-century or Victorian studies over writers
who can inhabit the edges of two neighboring categories simultaneously without
disrupting what is ultimately an open category.
A family resemblance approach would, in short,
help resolve a number of the debates on defining British Romanticism that
exercised earlier generations of Romanticists. It would not in itself, however,
do much to address the issues that concern us today: the remarkable endurance
of the constellation of canonical Romantic poets established very early in
this century; or the difficulty in incorporating "others" into the
canon in a more than ancillary way, in a way that might fundamentally redefine
the category rather than rearrange its edges, fuzzy though they be. Here the
body of research on categorization theory by Rosch, Lakoff, and others working
at the intersection of anthropology, cognitive psychology, and linguistics
can help account for the robustness of the British Romantic canon—and underscore
the constraints that have limited canon revision for the better part of a
century. If we do tend to construct categories around "best" or
"privileged" (Lakoff's term) examples—a tendency that probably
reflects our shared human cognitive architecture rather than a given cultural
style—then the persistence of the core British Romantic canon begins to seem
a good deal less mysterious. (5) I spoke above
of Romanticism in terms of formal and discursive features, but I do not think
that a group of salient features (which might be more closely identified with
one work or writer than with another) form the prototypes or cognitive reference
points for British Romanticism. (British Gothic, however, as Anne Williams
has persuasively argued in Art of Darkness, may be a different matter).
(6) Rather, my hunch is that a handful of "Romantic"
poets are the category's prototypical examples—making it a "polycentric"
category—and that they serve implicitly (and often explicitly) as our cognitive
reference points in discussions of whether a given work or writer qualifies
as "Romantic." (7) That is, the category
of British Romanticism, as it has existed for at least the past eighty years,
has been structured not only in terms of shared (but unevenly distributed)
features, but has been anchored by a set of authors who function as prototypical,
central, or "best" examples. These authors are Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Blake is not a prototypical Romantic author.Siskin's
now proverbial expression "six-poet Romanticism" (a.k.a."the
big six") is something of a misnomer: over the long haul, it is more
the "central five.". (8) Moreover, the
category exhibits what Lakoff calls a "radial structure" built from
metonymic "chaining." (9) "Other" writers are held to belong to the
category (or canon) in good part by virtue of their proximity to the prototypical
examples. This does not explain what writers or texts will, over time, be
added to the category: that depends, as much as does the instantiation (rather
than the organizing principle) of the category itself, on contingent, historical
factors. It does, however, help account for the order in which writers are
added to the category and for some of the typical justifications that are
used in adding them.
Before turning to the question of the "other"
writer, however, I want to buttress my claim that the "central five"
Romantic poets exhibit prototypical status and constitute the canon's "polycentric"
core. I have tried doing so by making a quick survey of all of the significant
teaching anthologies of British Romantic literature produced during this century
(from Woods in 1916 to Mellor and Matlak in 1996) with two hypotheses in mind.
(I chose teaching anthologies because these are calculated, for marketing
reasons, to reflect as wide a consensus in the field as possible; I chose
free-standing anthologies, rather than components of omnibus works like the
Norton Anthology, so that this effect would not be diluted by the appeal
of other sections of the larger work). My first hypothesis was that, if Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats indeed formed a prototypical group, every
anthology would accord each of these five poets, on the average, more space
than any other single writer. That is, while Wordsworth might get a bigger
share in one anthology, and Shelley in another, no anthology would ever promote
a sixth author, not even Blake, to prototypical status by allocating more
page space than given to the average "central five" writer. My second
hypothesis was that, if the five were really prototypical as a group (if the
category were indeed polycentric), despite fluctuations in the space allocated
any one of the five from one anthology to another, no poet of the five would
be accorded less than half the average amount of space given to a "central
five" poet. I calculated page space simply by determining the total number
of pages devoted to a given writer's work, excluding editors' general introductions
and material placed in appendices or "background" sections. Merely
counting pages in anthologies raises some methodological questions, but I
found it revealing in its very crudeness; it gives a low-resolution view with
high contrast values. (10)
I found seven anthologies to examine: George
Benjamin Woods' English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement (1916),
Ernest Bernbaum's Anthology of Romanticism and Guide Through the Romantic
Movement (2nd ed. 1933), Russell Noyes' English Romantic Poetry and
Prose (1956), David Perkins' English Romantic Writers (1967), John
Mahoney's The English Romantics (1978), Duncan Wu's Romanticism
(1994), and Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak's British Literature 1780-1830
(1996). (11) (I also looked at the revisions
of Wood in 1950, Bernbaum in 1948, and Perkins in 1995, but did not find variations
worth reporting in this context.) (12) This represents an eighty year span including at least two
major shifts in literary-historical practice: From the era of philology and
synoptic literary history represented by Woods and Bernbaum to the New Critical
era represented by Perkins and Mahoney, and then to the constellation of New
Historicism, feminism, and other contextualist approaches reflected in the
anthologies from the 1990s. Nevertheless, the seven anthologies represent
more continuity than change when one looks for their core examples rather
than for what they add (or, in the New Critical era, cut back on) beyond the
core. The results are tabulated in the appendix,
so I'll discuss only the highlights. My first hypothesis was confirmed in
every case. Each of the anthologies invariably gives the protypical Romantic
poets ample representation (not a very startling finding!) and (more interesting)
never "promotes" a sixth author to prototypical status. Although
the number of authors represented over all varies considerably—from a relatively
high number in the era of synoptic literary history (e.g., 65 in Woods) to
lower numbers in the era of New Criticism, and climbing back up again in the
current decade, the central examples remain the same and remain limited to
five.
The case of Blake is worth some comment. It
is not until the 1960s that Walter Scott is displaced by Blake as the best-represented
poet after the core five, but at that point Blake surges well beyond Scott's
twentieth-century peak. In fact, the two anthologies from the 60s and 70s
accord Blake more page space than Keats, although the number of pages given
to Blake never exceeds the average for the central five. That point
might seem forced, a mere artifact of the averaging procedure I used: after
all, looking at only those two anthologies, it could be argued that Blake
is a "better" example of British Romanticism than Keats. Note, however,
what happens in the anthologies from the 1990s. As the number of authors represented
expands (from 20 in Perkins and only 7 in Mahoney to 74 in Wu and 34 in Mellor/Matlak),
Blake loses ground again, falling behind Keats in both anthologies and below
a number of women writers in Mellor/Matlak. Over the long term, Blake emerges
as an important Romantic poet but ultimately fails to achieve prototypical
status. We can get a qualitative sense of Blake's difference by performing
a brief thought experiment. As you read the following two opening sentences,
imagine, if you will, the literary- historical argument that would most likely
follow from each. 1) "Blake can not properly be considered a Romantic
poet." 2) "Wordsworth cannot properly be considered a Romantic poet."
Most Romanticists, in my experience, will take the first sentence as beginning
an argument about Blake—and arguments that Blake seems eccentric in relation
to British Romanticism have often been made, even at the height of his reputation
as a "Romantic" poet. (13) The second
sentence, however, will be taken as leading to an argument deconstructing
the category of Romanticism altogether: if Wordsworth can't be considered
a Romantic poet, who can? (14)
Let's turn to my second hypothesis: if the
central five are all to be considered prototypical, than despite fluctuations
over the years—with sometimes Byron and sometimes Wordsworth getting the
most representation, and the least going sometimes to Coleridge and sometimes
to Keats, each of the five should always garner at least half the average
number of pages that a given anthology devotes to each of the five poets.
This hypothesis was confirmed in six of the seven anthologies, and disconfirmed
only in the case of Wu (in which Keats' share falls fifteen pages short of
the average). Given the comparatively small size of Keats' oeuvre in comparison
to the others, however, it may seem remarkable that Keats holds his own in
all but one of the anthologies. If, in contrast, the numbers were recalculated
for a "big six" group of writers, with Blake as the sixth, and the
averages adjusted accordingly, Blake would fall short of half of the average
number of pages in every one of the anthologies save the two from the 60s
and 70s. To summarize, while there is a good deal of variation from one anthology
to the next in terms of "favoring" one or two of the five over the
others, the five as a group always dominate, none of the five loses central
status, save in one case, and no other author is ever given as much space
as the average "central five" poet. This holds no less true of a
revisionary-looking anthology like Mellor/Matlak (which abjures the term "Romanticism"
but not, it seems, the category) than of Noyes or Perkins. That is not intended
to minimize the importance of the revisions: Blake eclipsing Scott as the
sixth best represented poet, or Hemans and Baillie both displacing Blake (in
Mellor/Matlak), or the shifting fortunes of the male essayists and (again
in Mellor/Matlak) the rise of female prose writers like Wollstonecraft and
Mary Shelley represent significant change. But only against a long-term pattern
of continuity at the heart of the canon.
We have circled back, then, to the question
with which we started. If British Romanticism has long been functioning in
ways that evoke what cognitive theorists call a "prototype category,"
in what ways might that facilitate, constrain, or condition canonical revision,
the incorporation of "other" writers into the category? I say facilitate,
to begin with, because (according to the cognitive linguist John Taylor) prototype
categories are notable precisely for their flexibility in accommodating new
information: where classical categories would demand new categories or the
redefinition of existing ones, new "entities . . . can be readily associated,
perhaps as peripheral members, to a prototype category, without necessarily
causing any fundamental restructuring of the category system." (15) Of course, if fundamental restructuring is at issue, that
same flexibility might prove a source of resilience and stability in the category
one seeks to unsettle. This does not mean that cognitive categories
are somehow immutable, eternal, or transcendental, like Platonic forms: on
the contrary, the categories are contingent and time-bound, and can change
significantly over time (think again of the category "furniture,"
as it might have changed from 1797 to 1997), though the cognitive mechanisms
that produce "prototypicality effects" seem themselves to be universal.
(16) Cognitive theory can merely help explain
the rather extraordinary staying power of the core Romantic canon over a century
of shifting literary-historical paradigms. Prototypes can die but, as Mandell
says of canons, they die hard.
Understanding British Romanticism as a prototype
category helps account for why its (fuzzy) temporal boundaries can expand
to include Chatterton or Carlyle, or contract to a narrower compass, without
fundamentally altering the our sense of "Romanticism"; why it can
prominently include prose essayists like Hazlitt, Lamb, and DeQuincey, or
deemphasize them in favor of women poets like Hemans and Barbauld, and still
seem remarkably familiar. The notion of British Romanticism that we have inherited
can tolerate a certain amount of canon revision outside of its prototypical
center, and it usually has, but the incorporation of "other" writers
and traditions has historically proceeded under certain predictable constraints
(represented by my two hypotheses) as well. Categorization theory helps us
understand why most of the change in anthologies has to do with what is added
to the "central five" selections—Scott or Blake? "pre-Romantics"
or "minor" Romantics? prose writers or women poets?—and why, again,
these changes don't cause large-scale disturbances in the literary-historical
system or in how the field is basically characterized and delimited. To borrow
from cognitive linguistics, the corpus of the central five remains the "unmarked"
term—"Romanticism"—while "pre-Romanticism," "prose
Romanticism," "minor" Romanticism, "dark
Romanticism," "women's Romanticism" or "feminine
Romanticism, are all "marked" terms, a reliable sign of atypicality.
(17)
Thinking of British Romanticism as a radial
prototype category can also help reveal certain patterns in the accommodation
of non- central writers and in the way additions to the canon are frequently
presented. Because radial categories are composed of chained elements that
"radiate" out from the central (prototypical) examples, and because
this chaining is frequently a matter of metonymic links as well as shared
features, we can see why arguments for adding a writer or group of writers
to the Romantic canon often emphasize such metonymic links. Early presentations
of John Clare, for example, stress that Clare and Keats shared the same publisher,
or emphasize the continuities among Clare's nature poetry and Wordsworth's,
while neglecting to mention, say, Clare's interest in Robert Bloomfield. (18) It is well known that early attempts (that is, attempts ten
years ago!) to complicate British Romanticism by acknowledging a "women's
romanticism" or "female romanticism," such as Susan Levin's
in 1987 or Meena Alexander's in 1989, did so in the name not of Felicia Hemans
or Letitia Landon, but of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose metonymic links to the "central five" poets could hardly be
stronger. (19) It could be objected, of course, that these writers
were first singled out because they had works in print; but the same was true
of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, who were not early recruits for a women's
romanticism, in good part, I would suggest, because of the absence of metonymic
links. (They were also identified with a genre, the domestic novel, that until
recently seemed unassimilable to Romanticism). When Stuart Curran argued,
in his pioneering 1988 essay, "The I Altered," for greater cognizance
of Romantic-era women poets, he appealed (quite cannily) as much to contiguities
as to difference, emphasizing, for example, the commitment to the vernacular
that many of the women shared with Wordsworth, and redeploying terms like
"sensibility" and "sympathy" that had long been associated
with canonical Romanticism. (20) We might expect
the editors who restored Hemans to the Romantic anthology in the 1990s to
underscore metonymic links by including her lyric "To Wordsworth,"
reminding us of Wordsworth's "praise" for Hemans in his "Extempore
Effusion," and perhaps referring to her rivalry with Byron and her aborted
correspondence with Percy Bysshe Shelley as well, and that is exactly what
we find: three of the four sentences that make up Wu's introduction to Hemans,
for example, manage to link or compare her to Wordsworth. The introduction
of women writers into the British Romantic canon (as represented by the anthologies)
in the 1990s, on an unprecedented scale, has been due, of course, to widespread
historical and social changes, most obviously the successes of the women's
movement over the past four decades and the concomitant rise of female scholars
in the academy. Categorization theory, particularly in its elucidation of
radial categories and the chaining mechanism they employ, can add something
about the order and manner in which these writers were recuperated, without
minimizing the importance of social factors.
I have suggested that understanding British
Romanticism as a cognitive category has a fair amount of explanatory power.
It allows us to see that the period has long been implicitly organized in
reference to a set of "best examples" (the five poets) and helps
account for both how changes outside of the prototypical center tend to occur
and why they fail to fundamentally disrupt the category. If we do unconsciously
hold British Romanticism as a radial prototype category, what are the consequences
for the future of canon revision, for the fortunes of canonical Romanticism's
"others"? It is crucial to recognize that the model I have proposed
is descriptive rather than normative: it helps us see that our period centers
on five poets (even in the recent anthologies) but does not imply that it
must or should be so constituted. It helps us account for the extraordinary
stability of the field despite the well-known fact that definitions of Romanticism
always seem to be in crisis. (This seeming contradiction stems, I suggest,
from mistaking a prototype category for a classical one.) Viewing British
Romanticism as a prototype category does not prevent us from significantly
changing it, but helps us understand why the category is so robust and why
fundamentally recasting it (should we want to) would require more than changing
the category name or adding or subtracting writers or texts around the center,
as the Mellor/Matlak anthology evinces. Breaking with British Romanticism
as it has been conceived during this century would mean significantly changing
the group of prototypes, or changing to a different sort of category structure
altogether. Simply, say, promoting Hemans to a higher level of attention (and
representation in the anthologies and other canon-making engines) than Keats
or Coleridge might ultimately produce what I'm tempted to term a "Blake
effect": a decade or two of prominence followed by yet another reaffirmation
of the central five. A more fundamental incorporation of Romanticism's "others"
might instead entail doing without "Romanticism" or demoting it
to one cultural tendency among others. Marilyn Butler's survey Romantics,
Rebels, and Reactionaries is a case in point. (21)
Butler iconoclastically attempts to rework the category by stretching its
temporal boundaries (beginning in 1760), making "Romanticism" one
of several broad cultural movements, exaggerating the differences between
the first and second generation Romantic poets by associating the latter with
a "neoclacissal" revival, making room for the domestic and historical
novel (more easily done in a survey text than in an anthology), and giving
prominence to non-canonical figures like Southey, Edgeworth, and Peacock.
(22) One can imagine a comparable strategy that
might ultimately reduce the prominence of core Romanticism to the sort of
role that Metaphysical poetry (another prototype category) plays within Renaissance
(or is it Early Modern?) studies.
This last point brings us to the disequilibrium
between "British Romanticism" and most of the other hiring fields
(which tend to be meta- categories made up of radial and other category types
plus additional elements), perhaps helping to explain the sense of vulnerability
that has been aired over the past year on the NASSR-L. The "Eighteenth
Century," for example, is at its core a classical category (it is hard
to imagine arguing whether a poet or novelist publishing in the 1740s is an
"eighteenth-century writer"), but it has proved nevertheless fuzzy
enough to absorb "Restoration" writing—no longer a hiring field—and
reconstitute itself as the "long" eighteenth century. Groups of
writers within the eighteenth-century parameters have often been treated as
prototype categories—the "age of Johnson," the "age of Pope,"
"sensibility poets"—but as a meta-category, the Eighteenth Century
has proved remarkably flexible, identified with no one genre (as British Romanticism
has long been identified with poetry), more quick to accomodate "other"
writers, and manifesting a good deal of variety even in its most selective
incarnations. British Romanticism may ultimately feel narrow, and hence open
to absorption by its neighboring periods, because it is so closely identified
with a group of only five writers. Somewhat ironically, many who consider
themselves "Romanticists" exhibit, in their research and teaching,
a broad set of literary interests: in the domestic novel, the Gothic, the
feminist enlightenment, Anglo-African writing, and early British children's
literature, in addition to lyric, dramatic, and epic-length poetry by women
as well as men. Can "British Romanticism" be expanded so that it
is felt (not only by Romanticists) to include Austen, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe,
Lewis, Equiano, Edgeworth, Crabbe, and Hemans? Or are critics like Butler
right in thinking that the conventional period name is too closely bound to
five or six poets to adequately convey the full range of literary activity
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?
Up to now I have fashionably avoided the question
of literary quality, but the very mention of Austen suggests that literary
quality cannot in itself account for the constitution of British Romanticism
around the work of five poets. I do think that literary quality, at least
as it has been understood for some time, has a good deal to do with why those
five poets became central or prototypical in the first place. Notions of literary
quality are less helpful, however, in discussions of why, say, Crabbe has
been so long neglected, or why British Romanticism did become so closely associated
with certain related poetic modes, exemplified by the "central five"
poets, in the course of the nineteenth century. This is a story that has been
well told by others and I have little to add here to their accounts. (23)
Rosch's description of prototypes as cognitive reference points does, however,
seem relevant:
Prototypes as reference
points of categories may be representative either because the most representative
members of categories are taken as the prototype or because those members
are salient points in a domain and the category tends to form around them
so that they become representative of it. (24)
That is, once a complex
of political, social, and literary-historical factors, as well as judgments
of literary quality, positioned the five poets at the heart of the developing
category, the sort of category-formation mechanism that Rosch hypothesizes
may have helped the period definition congeal into the form characterized
by the twentieth-century anthologies.
A final question remains concerning the perennially
vexed relation of British Romanticism to other Romantic categories, such as
European Romanticism, American Romanticism, or Romanticism in nineteenth-century
art or music. It may be worth noting in this context simply that the relation
is perennially vexed and that no attempt (such as Wellek's) to establish
a European Romantic category that would subsume British Romanticism has succeeded.
Although there are certainly many meaningful ways to discuss Romanticism across
national and disciplinary boundaries, these do not appear to have had much
of an effect on the way British Romanticism is generally constituted, at least
in terms of anthologies and much of the literary criticism. (A colleague of
mine in Romance Languages regularly complains that "Romanticism"
is used in book titles, without further qualification, to stand for British
Romanticism—again, the "unmarked" term, but here in relation to
French or German or other continental Romanticisms.) This too
may stem from the prototypical nature of the category as implicitly used by
scholars trained in British Romanticism. The peculiar insistence of this category
should not, however, be cause for despair. I would rather end by stressing
once more that if British Romanticism is a prototype category, that doesn't
make it transcendental, inevitable, or immutable. It does make it familiar
and rather predictable, qualities that, in an octogenarian, can be both frustrating
and endearing.
Alan
Richardson
Boston College
Notes
(1)
For a useful introduction, see John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization:
Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
(back)
(2) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3d ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1968)
32, 34. (back)
(3) George Lakoff, Women, Fire,
and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987) 6; Eleanor Rosch, "Prototype Classification and
Logical Classification: The Two Systems," New Trends in Conceptual
Representation: Challenges to Piaget's Theory?, ed. Ellin Kofsky Scholnick
(Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1983) 79. (back)
(4) Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism,
ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 128-221. (back)
(5) Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things 150. (back)
(6) Anne Williams, Art of Darkness:
A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 1-24. (back)
(7) For "polycentric" categories,
see Taylor, Linguistic Categorization 99. (back)
(8) Clifford Siskin, The Historicity
of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 29; Siskin's critique
of the "traditional six-poet, 1789-1832 Romanticism of the anthologies
and most criticism" begins on p. 8. (back)
(9) Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things 91-114. (back)
(10) Here are a few methodological issues
that instantly come to mind: Would it be more appropriate to count lines or
even words rather than pages? (But then, don't publishers tend to think in
terms of page space?) How well do teaching anthologies really correspond to
what gets taught? How does the allocation of space in teaching anthologies
relate to a given writer's reputation as guaged by the number of critical
books and articles produced over time? I find this last question particularly
intriguing and recommend it to those with unlimited time or inexhaustible
research assistance. (back)
(11) For bibliographical details, including
number of pages overall, see Appendix (A). (back)
(12) See Appendix (B). (back)
(13) See, e.g., Daniel Stempel, "Blake,
Foucault, and the Classical Episteme," PMLA96:3 (May 1981):
388-407. (back)
(14) When I read these two opening lines
to an audience of Romanticists when giving a version of this paper at the
1997 NASSR annual meeting in Hamilton, the first was followed by a few moments
of thoughtful silence, the second by a moment of silence and then a burst
of laughter. (back)
(15) Taylor, Linguistic Categorization
53. (back)
(16) Ellen Spolsky argues that prototype
categories—open-ended, fuzzy, and often including contradictory members—are
in fact notable for their instability, and help account for literary historical
change in relation to genres, periods, etc. Spolky's emphasis on instability,
however, should be set against Taylor's remarks on "fundamental"
stability, cited above. See Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation
and the Modular Mind (Albany: State U of New York P, 1993) 73. (back)
(17) Lakoff, Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things 59-61. (back)
(18) Perkins' headnote to Clare (in
1967), for example, mentions that he was published by "the same firm
that was now publishing Keats," that during a visit to London he "met
Coleridge, Lamb, De Quincey," that "Pastoral Poetry" shows
him "assimilating ideas derived mainly from Wordsworth and Coleridge,"
and that his writing bears affinities to Keats and to Blake. This is interesting
and useful information that also helps us see the process of "chaining"
at work. (back)
(19) Susan Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth
and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1987) 157; Meena Alexander,
Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary
Shelley (London: MacMillan, 1989) 1. (back)
(20) Stuart Curran, "The 'I' Altered,"
Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1988) 185-207. (back)
(21) Marilyn Butler, Romantics,
Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981). (back)
(22) Mellor and Matlak attempt something
similar in insisting, in the "General Introduction" to British
Literature 1780-1830, that their anthology is "designed to
be used in conjunction with at least two novels," Frankenstein
and any novel by Jane Austen (p. 3, italics in original). As Mellor pointed
out during the question period after this paper was presented, Frankenstein
is currently the most taught of any Romantic-era literary work. This may represent
significant change in the category of British Romanticism that my survey of
anthologies necessarily missed. (back)
(23) See especially David Perkins, Is
Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 85-119
and, on the exclusion of women poets, Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine
Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford
UP, 1989). On Crabbe see Jerome J. McGann, "The Anachronism of George
Crabbe," The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in
Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 294-312. (back)
(24) Rosch, "Prototype Classification"
79. (back)
