Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface: ?A Poem Should be Equal To: / Not True?
Alan Liu
Introduction: Reflections on an Orthodoxy
Damian Walford Davies
1. The Incommensurable Value of Historicism
Tim Milnes
2. The Hair of Milton: Historicism and Literary History
Erik Gray
3. ?In Embalm?d Darkness?: Keats, the Picturesque, and the Limits of Historicization
Kelly Grovier
4. Telling Lives to Children: Young versus New Historicism in Little Arthur?s History of England
Michael Simpson
5. Whose History? My Place or Yours? Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions
Kenneth R. Johnston
6. Overlooking History: The Case of John Thelwall
Judith Thompson
7. Byron?s Cain and the ?History? of Cradle Songs
Damian Walford Davies
8. Romanticism, Feminism, History, Historicism: A Conversation
Anne K. Mellor and Susan J. Wolfson
9. Romanticism and the Feminist Uses of History
Gary Kelly
10. New Historicism, New Austen, New Romanticism
Robert Miles
11. Leigh Hunt and Romantic Biography
Nicholas Roe
Contributors
Notes
Index
List of Images
Frontispiece: J. M. W. Turner (1775?1851), War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet. Oil on Canvas; exhibited 1842. ? Tate, London 2007.
Figure 1: Lady Maria Callcott, Little Arthur?s History of England; title-page of the Century Edition, 1936, revised 1962.
Figure 2: Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the historian, just prior to his assassination by a mounted knight. ? Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.
Figure 3: Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur is taken into police custody. ? Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.
Figure 4: James Gillray (1757?1815), Smelling out a Rat; or, The Atheistical-Revolutionist disturbed in his Midnight ?Calculations,? published by Hannah Humphrey in 1790 (hand-coloured etching). ? Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Acknowledgments
The ?history? of this volume goes back to the Romanticism, History, Historicism conference which I co-organized in June 2004 with Richard Marggraf Turley in the English Department at Aberystwyth University, Wales. Thanks are due to Richard and all the delegates who attended that gathering for their contribution to the lively discussion out of which the present collection emerges.
As ever, I would like to thank Francesca Rhydderch for her support and encouragement.
Damian Walford Davies
Aberystwyth, Wales
April 2008
Preface: ?A Poem Should be Equal To: / Not True?
Alan Liu
Facing one?s own physical mortality or that of one?s coevals is a hard thing. Facing the mortality of one?s intellectual moment is gentler, calling less for rage against the dying of the light than for a wry moue of self-assertion mixed with self-effacement ? as if to say, while pausing over a photograph album with an impatient young one at our knee, Yes, that was our time; that was our fight . . . (turn the page) . . . What was the assignment your teacher said you needed an old picture for?
The time that has passed since the appearance of the first major New Historicist works and forums ? e.g., Stephen Greenblatt?s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), the Representations journal (first issue, 1983), and Jerome J. McGann?s The Romantic Ideology (1983) ? now approaches the literal human generational interval (currently about 30 years). And being asked to write a preface for a volume on Romantic New Historicism ? especially one subtitled ?Essays on an Orthodoxy? ? certainly provokes, from one of the original cohort, that moue. In the Romantics field, the cohort, band, legion, horde, or perhaps just swarm I refer to originally included besides McGann such others in the 1980s as James Chandler, Kenneth Johnston, Marjorie Levinson, David Simpson, and myself. This crew ? with others publishing from the late 1980s to the present ? intersected and/or clashed (sometimes unpredictably) with other intellectual movements of the time, whether residual, dominant, or emergent (to use Raymond Williams?s terms). These movements included formalism, intellectual history, ?old historicism? (contextual criticism respectful of an ontological divide between text and context), British cultural materialism, French poststructuralism, Yale-school deconstruction, cultural anthropology, the ?new cultural history? (e.g., new-wave French Revolution history after Fran?ois Furet), and historically-inflected feminist/gender studies (e.g., work relating to the French Revolutionary era by Julie Carlson, Lynn Hunt, Mary Jacobus, and Leslie Rabine). In addition, of course, the Romantics branch of the movement was perceived to be part of the larger genus of New Historicism as it hived off from Renaissance studies into the long eighteenth- and -nineteenth-century fields (British and American) ? even if, in fact, Romantic New Historicism was the most self-enclosed of all this brood and exhibited some striking species differences.1
I call Romantic New Historicism a swarm because even those presumed to be at its core never actually sat down together for an ecumenical council establishing doctrine. Indeed, it is something of a paradox that Renaissance New Historicism, despite its often remarked diffidence toward theory, demonstrated far more real solidarity of method. The building blocks of a Renaissance New Historicist essay might thus be inventoried: a thematic focus on some concrete individual, event, or artifact serving as a spy in the house of power; ?anecdotal? argument provoking wonder, scandal, and the defamiliarization of the ?Elizabethan world picture?; paradoxical figures of speech such as chiasmus (e.g., ?the forms of power and the power of forms?), indicating equality of text and context; piercing moments of self-reflection that break the illusion of the past to show the interpreter naked in his own times (e.g., Greenblatt?s vignette of himself on an airplane at the end of Renaissance Self-Fashioning); and, at the close of the historical tragicomedy, a marriage of opposites between ?power? and ?representation.? By contrast (one of the species differences I mentioned), Romantic New Historicism was raised an inmate of the house of theory, whether original to Romanticism (?ideology,? ?dialectic?) or, more proximately, Yale-school (especially ?language?-theory of the 1970s rendered through experimental readings of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, etc.). It is no wonder that Romantic New Historicists were far more likely to write anti- or trans-Romantic, Marxist, formalist, and deconstructive manifestos. Yet, and here is the paradox, the movement as a whole was far less cohesive in its declared paradigms (Heine? Della Volpe? Spinoza? where is Foucault?), evidentiary materials, and writing style. By comparison with Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, and others in the Renaissance field, Romantic New Historicism was not so much a solution as a particulate suspension of dialectical, cultural materialist, formalist, poststructuralist, intellectual-historical, textual-historical or editorial, and other methods.
One way to think about this is to suppose that ?Romantic Ideology,? as McGann called it, actually has no outside and so enwraps even the New Historicists who recoiled against the complicity of Romantic scholarship with Romantic belief. If Romantic New Historicism is a swarm, then this may be because it still lives the afterlife of the contradiction between the theory of the ideal (Geist) and the theory of materialism (anti-?German ideology?). That teeming contradiction is what the original historicism of the nineteenth century (Historismus) knew as the post-revolutionary mob, crowd, or ? anticipating what we today call culture ? spirit of the times. And it is that swarming contradiction between the singular ideal (do the people have ideas, let alone an idea?) and the massed material (give us bread, ale, and films!) definitive of modern human experience that has not been solved by all our later theories of modernist form, poststructuralist language, and ? today?s heir apparent to cultural studies ? postindustrial globalism (global anything: economy, society, culture, language, media, etc.).
So I do not presume to speak for Romantic New Historicism as an orthodoxy. I can only speak for orthodox me. Or, to say the same with a self-ironic moue (or Cheshire Cat?s grin) intended to pass off the Romantic self as the modern and postmodern subject: I can only speak for the larger generational and systemic forces that speak themselves through my social position as an orthodoxy ? a temporarily stabilized contingency ? called me.
But what if for just a moment I were to bare my heart? What if I were to strip from my face the thin grin forced on this preface by the effort of being nice to the generations hurrying on? Damn Romantic Ideology: what if I were to say what the pre-orthodox me believed ? strongly enough, in any case, to draw me to Romanticism in the first place ? before such conviction could be accused of churching itself?
I would say that my heart still stops when I come upon such moments in the present volume as Kenneth Johnston?s tally ? a census of the disappeared ? of all the Romantic voices murdered, silenced, or mutilated by the terror (and, just as thuggish, Pittite anti-terror) of their times. Explicitly adapting McGann?s assertion that ?the poetry of Romanticism is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement,? Johnston pins the origin of such displacement to the systemic forces ? bad cops, as it were, to the Romantic good cops of nature and imagination ? that did the actual wet work making dead bodies, mangled voices, and (the obverse of today?s ?illegal immigrants?) legally mandated emigrants (political criminals transported to Australia). Johnston?s wall of the disappeared ? like more recent walls on which people in various nations have pinned mourning photos and testaments ? can be found on pages (000) below. Here is a sampling to give the effect of how history came down like a guillotine ? or, closer to home, Pittite ?gagging act? ? on the Romantics:

1) death by execution or from the effects of imprisonment (William Orr, Joseph Gerrald, Gilbert Wakefield);
2) imprisonment or transportation (John Thelwall, James Montgomery, the ?Scottish Martyrs?);
3) abscondment, flight, emigration or self-exile (Paine, Priestley, Helen Maria Williams, William Cobbett, Robert Merry, Alexander Callender);
4) arrest, detention, and long periods of being ?held for questioning? in defiance of, or during the frequent abeyance of, the right of habeas corpus (Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, William Drennan);
5) financial penalty or material ruination, including permanently damaged career prospects (William Frend, Elizabeth Inchbald, Francis Wrangham, David Williams, Thomas Beddoes, Sr.);
6) episodes of continuous government and/or vigilante harassment (Robert Bage, Robert Burns, Thelwall);
7) psychological damage or physical harm, temporary or permanent (John Tweddell, Charles Lloyd, George Burnett, William Wordsworth, Joseph Ritson, Beddoes, Sr.);
8) effective silencing and discouragement of literary production (Bage, Mary Hays, Montgomery, Eliza Fenwick, Anna Barbauld);
9) extended periods of orchestrated public criticism, ridicule and (unprosecuted) libel (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sydney Owenson, Charlotte Smith);
. . .
18) public recantation of former opinions, and/or informing on or otherwise besmirching the reputations of former liberal colleagues (Coleridge, Mackintosh) . . .

Rarely since I first read Victor Erlich?s account of the Soviet thugs who silenced the Russian Formalists ? in the same years when American New Criticism took off ? have I been moved as close to tears by an account of mere intellectual history. (See especially chapters 7 and 8 in Erlich?s Russian Formalism: History ? Doctrine (1981).) Johnston?s tally is the Vietnam War Memorial of our Romanticism, where our indicates the time tunnel between circa 1789 and the post-1968 milieu. After all, it was the thwarting of ?revolution? in this latter milieu and its rechanneling into ?theory? that first incubated poststructuralism and, later, the New Historicism. In almost exactly the same years, it may be noted, the Chinese Cultural Revolution played the flip side of the record: history pressed not into theory but self-mutilating public confession, for which Romantic autobiographical poetry is as good a Western premonition as any.
Reading Johnston?s census, I am also reminded of the time I came upon the astoundingly full English Lakes vocabulary for punishing children that Melvyn Bragg recorded with a touch of native pride in Land of the Lakes (1983). I briefly excerpted from Bragg in my Wordsworth: The Sense of History:

bensal To thrash severely and repeatedly, say a sturdy lad or truant.
bray To pound; chastise and bruise, mostly in reference to children.
break To beat with a stick (used chiefly as a threat), generally applied to boys.
hidin? A thrashing administered to a boy or girl by the parent.
leas To chastise a boy with a switch.
ledder To thrash a boy severely, similar to ?bray.?
nointin?, ointin? The punishment which the schoolmaster gives to the scholars, evidently with ?strap oil.?
paik A very severe beating given by the schoolmaster. ?Paiks? is also said of a continuance of blows whereby a person becomes exhausted.
pay Any form of punishment administered for the correction of a fault committed by a child. To settle a grievance by beating.
peg A beating less severe than a ?paikin,? generally with a fist.
skelp A smart blow applied by the mother?s open hand on the child?s bare buttocks.
smack Same as ?skelp? but on any part of the body.
spank Same as ?skelp? but on any part of the body, and less severely than ?noint.?
stirrup oil, strap oil Chastisement given to a child with a leather strap similar to that one used by a shoemaker to hold his work firmly on his knee.
trim To whip a child.
troonce To thrash deliberately as a punishment.
twank To beat with a stick, similar to ?welt.?
warm To beat, but especially said of children; these last four are very akin to one another in meaning.
As such a list shows, unfortunately, part of what we mean by history is that the man really is the father of the child before, as Wordsworth imagined, the child can be father of the man. The regime for disappearing young souls reckoned in Bragg?s glossary is the parent of all the domestic, regional, social, economic, national, imperial, and (today) neoliberal and fundamentalist global forces that ? as cultural critics euphemize ? construct us. (In the post 9/11 milieu, we would need to add ?waterboard? to the vocabulary of good torture.)
I juxtapose Johnston?s and Bragg?s tallies to bring into clear focus what the New Historicism, in my view, was ultimately all about. Renaissance New Historicism, its detractors tell us, was just about anecdotes. When Greenblatt, Montrose, and others (not to mention the micro-historians of the ?new cultural history?) staged anecdotes of history and so amputated any organic view of the Elizabethan world picture, the question was asked: how do we transcend a Foucauldian historicism of radical discontinuity to make sense of it all? In Romantic New Historicism, the discontinuity was signed ?displacement.? As I once summarized in ?The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning?: ?what is there in a poem is precisely what is not there: all the history that has been displaced, erased, suppressed, elided, overlooked, overwritten, omitted, obscured, expunged, repudiated, excluded, annihilated, and denied.? This glossary of New Historicist displacement is predominantly Latinate, of course, and so ? because Latin in English has been neutralized into abstractness ? anaesthetized. We have lost a sense of the murderous force at the root ? the force, for instance, with which the Roman legions literally decimated their own armies (not to mention auxiliary barbarian armies and whole attached populations).
To resharpen the point, therefore, let me stage a micro-drama of what Romantic New Historicism was about:

[Formalist or Old Historicist:] What whole and positive truth, experience, or expression of humanity is cut off by your hermeneutics of suspicion, which can see in literature only a mutilated stump ? a displacement or denial ? of what is not there?
[New Historicist:] Do you mean the systemic historical forces that cut off heads, transported radicals, and mangled into imagination the intellectual life of the period 1790?1840? Do you mean the inhuman national or domestic regimes that silenced or perverted whole generations by braying, breaking, leddering, nointing, paying, pegging, skelping, smacking, trimming, or twanking them into modernized creatures of the good? Or again (though to my own personal shame much of the New Historicism was originally insensitive to feminist criticism, and vice versa, except as mediated through class or social issues): Do you mean the positivist, paternalistic truth of history that made women into what was once said about prehistorical tribes: a silenced ?people without history??

I confess that I am a creature of my intellectual moment, which confession ? a naked instance of what David Simpson calls ?situatedness? ? is the ultimate moue of any generation witnessing its own passing. But I do not think I will apologize, except in the strong sense of generative apologetics instanced in Shelley?s Defence of Poetry. The moment I mean is the post-1968 zeitgeist when a whole generation of literary critics felt the need to link literary criticism to the aftermath of protest in the streets ? if not exactly in step with such protest (since much of what happened in the streets was also thuggish), then at least to the tune of the same drummer that the Romantics also called the People. History silences people. But, as I put it in my Wordsworth book, the very form of such denial can be transmuted into a literature of the persistent ? if displaced, emigrant, and refugee ? hopes and loves of people. There shall be erected no border wall able to stop the mobilization of the desire to be human, illegal or otherwise. Yes, that is what Romanticism said.
So perhaps at last I will rage against the dying of the light and, at least for a moment, free my face of the moue it must wear to go through the generational airport security gate (as when the alarm sounds and one mimes, ?who, me??). It would be stupid to say that May 1968 is September 2001, or that either is 1789. But some rough beast comes round again. Romantic literature gave voice to the darkness and silence of its time through brilliant explosions ? and self-mutilating implosions ? of language. It all had something to do with the Revolution, the People, ordinary people, children, and (we belatedly remember) women, not to mention the mute creatures of this earth that Romanticism may or may not have given voice to in the name of nature (a vexed issue in second-generation ecocriticism). Such was the original rage that lit the fuse of Romantic New Historicism. The predecessor Romantics made from their rage a literature of bliss (?Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive?) maturing into disturbed joy (?A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts?). Subsequent chapters in their Bildungsroman were dejection, irony, and other displacements of the songs of innocence. The sum was a Romanticism that joined cruelty and beauty in the dearly coupled history and romance of the times. Can a similar rage/joy (the extreme antinomy behind my moue) be communicated today to the new generations enthralled by endless cycles of terror and anti-terror? That is the question of Romantic New Historicism.
That is the question, if not for the ages, then for our age, where ?our? is in transition to the future. If literature, whatever its eventual medium, is to carry forward, it must speak not just for its time but for what is silent in its time and so only hearable ? even if just as ghostly form ? as history or future. The residual New Critic in me thinks this is what literature is still for. Archibald MacLeish?s poem ?Ars Poetica? (1925), the anthem of the New Critical movement, is best known for its concluding proposition: ?A poem should not mean / But be.? But, over the years, I have come to find more moving, if at first glance abstract, the empty ? and emptying ? formula that begins its last verse paragraph: ?A poem should be equal to: / Not true.? There are many ways to read this self-cancelling Liar?s Paradox proposition, among which the anti-scientism of first-wave New Criticism (e.g., John Crowe Ransom) is most obvious. But ? given the neo-Agrarian resistance of the post-Civil War Southern avant-garde (the immediate ancestor of the New Criticism), and given too the survivor rage of such World War I veterans as MacLeish ? I think the paradoxical proposition must also be read as a protest statement: ?Not true!? It is a graffiti-like scratching out of the positively stated cultural themes, meanings, and other certitudes ascribed to literature ? real orthodoxy ? that says, in a whorl of words or spray paint (whatever medium is handy and less dear than blood) that something lies unsaid. Whatever comes after MacLeish?s colon ? a typographical boundary-marker of the muddy, bloody no-man?s-land where pre-World War I ideas of humanity expired ? lies mutilated. It is a silent reminder of the inhuman. But literature finds unpredictable ways (who would have guessed? a colon) to speak the silence that tells us what it means to be human in the face of the terribly modern, and old, inhuman. One such literature was: Romantic.