The Romantic Ideology

"I’ve chosen this book because, along with other essays by Jerome McGann, it does explain and consider what Romanticism is, and how it continued to influence our ways of thinking. Romanticism can be regarded as beginning as a movement in the later 18th century in Germany and going on until the mid-Victorian period. It has a number of components that don’t necessarily cohere. One is the rhetoric of individual genius, inspiration and creativity that takes it as given that the greatest authors and artists are able to declare truths that transcend their own times. Another is an emphasis on individual feeling that can be seen as a reaction to the mechanistic view of human nature that you get in the philosophical writings of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. A third was that individuals can learn timeless truths direct from looking at “nature”, such as the mountains and the forests, conceived of as unchanging and benevolent, without the hard grind of study and education. When, for example, Wordsworth claims that “One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can”, we can surely now see that this is nonsense. It is not a perennial truth but a way of thinking common in Wordsworth’s day and earlier, but now of only historical interest – it is an error that has been superseded. What McGann says is that literary studies, and studies of Romanticism in particular, were prisoners of the phenomenon that they were allegedly studying. Such studies commonly talked about individual genius and about the meaning of the text as if that was fixed. They operated in a tradition of hermeneutics, which came from bible studies, that regards literary works as containing hidden truths that can be teased out by careful armchair study. Editors searched for the final intentions of the author as being the best guide to his best thought. In fact, as emerges from many empirical studies of how Romantic works actually came into being in the form that they did, many people besides the authors normally participated in the composition, production, presentation and dissemination, and printed texts were seldom stable. And besides being socially produced, they were also socially consumed, not only by being read aloud and talked about in drawing rooms and reading clubs, but by having been composed with the known preferences of readerships anticipated in the actual writing. I chose McGann because he rightly says we shouldn’t uncritically swallow Romanticism but should unpick its assumptions and study literature, and the effects of literature, just as we should study other phenomena, by standing outside and not inside the rhetorics. My book is very much outside the rhetorics of Romanticism. A lot of books nowadays claim to stand outside these rhetorics. There is nothing wrong with studying and celebrating the great authors, even when we cannot accept their worldview, and I am not advocating cultural relativism. Where the confusing error occurred was in thinking that studying the great authors in the “canon” takes us somehow to what actually happened in the past, or to the ways of thinking prevalent in the past. There is also another point I would like to make. We have a spate of books now which I call “in the imagination” books, where the author, rightly distrustful of taking the great canonical authors as representative of an age, makes his or her anthology of non-canonical texts. So a scholar might bring together a piece of political writing, a play, a long-forgotten novel written by a woman and a book of advice on children’s education, that were all produced at much the same time, and the author then makes remarks about them and the “imagination” of the society from which they emanated. This kind of study is, frankly, quite easy to do in the age of on-line texts, but I’m very sceptical about the methodology or the general usefulness of what they can tell us, given that there is an infinitude of texts from which such anthologies can be compiled and an infinitude of criteria for making the selections. What claim can such texts have to represent the “imagination” of an age? These studies appear to me to be a residue of the romantic notion that texts deserve to be scrutinised without paying regard to the material conditions under which they were produced and read, or the many alternative texts that their readers, if there were any, had access to, and may have been influenced by."