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This volume of
In recent decades skirmishes about how to read literature and culture have at times polarized critics, who find themselves identified, or identify themselves, with distinct critical dispositions toward either historicism or toward some version of poststructuralist writing, in particular deconstruction, supposed to be suspicious of historicism for espousing an empiricist, neo-positivist perspective on the past. What emerges from this standoff can seem comical or simply bizarre as one side imagines the other as its constitutive other, and as such productive of readings in which something is missing. Deconstructive and poststructural readers who ground their readings in philosophical argument and rhetorical nuance are at the very least bemused by the focus on detail in new historicist readings or the large gestures of cultural studies readings. In reply historicist and cultural critics find the lacunae in arguments from philosophical points of departure damaging to the lived temporality of writing and culture. Although this dispute animates more than one moment of literary study (it has become more marked in Victorian studies), its most sustained version has concerned Romanticism, understood variously since the 1980s as the disputed subject of new historicism and deconstruction.
Whatever else it is, Romanticism arises in a moment of extraordinary and divisive recognition of differences among races, peoples, and political programs. And at least since the 1980s, the era has remained the focus of critical dissent as deconstructive, new historicist and other critical arguments debated whose Romanticism was theirs. This debate has in turn helped to shape public understanding of how we read literature and culture now as an enterprise strangely and contentiously divided between thinking about the work of language or the character of historical difference as though each goal could be separated from the other. This opposition is strangely rigid, easy to caricature and, as importantly, easy to dismiss. What gets lost in this critical antagonism is the shimmer of historical and philosophical friction in Romanticism itself and in compelling Romantic criticism in the last decade.
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The
Ian Duncan
is Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at University of California,
Berkeley. He is author of the award-winning
Mary A. Favret is Professor of English literature at Indiana
University-Bloomington, where she specializes in literature and culture of
the eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuries, especially British Romanticism. The
author of
Colin Jager
is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, where he is
currently co-director of the “Mind and Culture” seminar at the Center for
Cultural Analysis. His articles have appeared in
Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at
University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of
Jacques Khalip is associate professor of English and Modern Culture and Media
at Brown University. He is the author of
Daniel O'Quinn is an Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre
Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the author of
Matthew Rowlinson is Associate Professor in the
Department of English and Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of
Western Ontario. He is the author of