Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation

200 Pages·2016·1.51 MB·English

by  Emily Rohrbach

MODERNITY’S MIST
Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors
Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional
notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to
the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely,
anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because
they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for
books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and
in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and
abroad.
At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms
literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism.
Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of
romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as
forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled
possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the
romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a
way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit
Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of
romanticism.
In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars
of romanticism, team-taught a course called Literature Z
that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of
literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read
a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention
to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the
bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’
conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of
recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism.
Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness
and history’s enigmatic force.
MODERNITY’S MIST
British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation
Emily Rohrbach
Forham University Press
New York 2016
Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rohrbach, Emily.
Modernity’s Mist : British Romanticism and the poetics of anticipation / Emily
Rohrbach. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Lit Z)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-6796-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-8232-6797-2 (paper)
1. Romanticism—Great Britain. 2. English literature—18th century—History
and criticism. 3. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—18th century.
4. Time in literature. 5. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
6. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Poetics—
History—18th century. 8. Poetics—History—19th century. I. Title.
PR447.R65 2015
820.9’145—dc23
2015008869
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
to David Wagenknecht

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: On Being in a Mist 1
1. From Precedents to the Unpredictable:
Historiographical Futurities 28
2. Dizzy Anticipations: Sonnets by Keats (and Shelley) 58
3. Accommodating Surprise: Keats’s Odes 77
4. Contingencies of the Future Anterior:
Austen’s Persuasion 106
5. The “Double Nature” of Presentness:
Byron’s Don Juan 134
Notes 163
Index 183

Acknowledgments
When I approached Fordham University Press with this book in the sum-
mer of 2013, the late Helen Tartar responded with warmth and encour-
agement; I am extraordinarily lucky to have had her as a reader who found
value in the manuscript and was willing to send it forward. Throughout
the process, Tom Lay, as assistant editor and then editor, has been the stuff
of dreams: insightful, savvy, prompt, and supportive. I am deeply grateful
to Fordham University Press as well as to Tres Pyle and the anonymous
reader for their knowledgeable, rigorous, and constructive reports. I am
honored that the co-editors of the new Lit Z series, Sara Guyer and Brian
McGrath, accepted the book for their list.
At Northwestern, I landed in a department of astonishingly fine readers
and generous colleagues for whom I count my lucky stars. I was especially
warmly welcomed (over grits and eggs at regular Dixie Kitchen breakfasts)
by the junior faculty, including Katy Breen, Nick Davis, Evan Mwangi,
Susie Phillips, Helen Thompson, and Ivy Wilson. Since then, the arrival
of Harris Feinsod, Jim Hodge, Rebecca Johnson, Andrew Leong, Juan
Martinez, and Shaun Myers has assured me that amazing colleagues are
a tradition in University Hall. Each of them has contributed substantially
to the pleasures—and the genuine sense of fun—I’ve enjoyed in everyday
teaching and research, and they’ve helped me through all sorts of intellec-
tual, professional, and practical challenges as well. Chris Herbert, Chris
Lane, Carl Smith, and Julia Stern have read and commented generously
on my work. Jules Law and Viv Soni read nearly every page of the book
manuscript at least once and gave invaluable feedback; I cannot thank
them enough. My early career has been rich in remarkably supportive
department chairs: Katie Kodat at Hamilton College, Susan Manning, and
Chris Herbert. Most recently, Laurie Shannon has been the department
chair extraordinaire.
I’ve enjoyed stimulating interdisciplinary conversations with César Braga-
Pinto, Clare Cavanagh, Jorge Coronado, Anna Parkinson, and Michelle
M. Wright, and my work was enriched by a full year of my immersion in
such exchanges thanks to a Faculty Fellowship at the Alice Kaplan Institute
for the Humanities. With her incisive questions and brilliant leadership
x Acknowledgments
throughout that year, Director Holly Clayson taught me much about inter-
disciplinary thought.
For their inspiring conversation and resonant writing, I am deeply
grateful to a number of Romanticists, many of whom I meet most often
at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)
conferences: Matt Borushko, Tim Campbell, Mark Canuel, Kevis Good-
man, Eric Lindstrom, Jonathan Mulrooney, Anahid Nersessian, Onno
Oerlemans, Chuck Rzepka, and Emily Sun. Jonathan Gross and Piya
Pal-Lapinski gave generously of their time and their expertise on Byron
by reading Chapter 5 and helping me see what needed to be done. On all
things narrative theory and beyond, Peter Rabinowitz has been a genial
and supportive interlocutor. Ian Balfour read several chapters in very
rough form, intervening at a crucial stage with helpful suggestions and
encouragement. In my work-in-progress seminar at NASSR 2013, Marjo-
rie Levinson delivered the formal response to a version of Chapter 2 with
characteristic rigor and generosity of spirit. Among other acts of generosity,
Brian McGrath, with sensitivity and insight, read the entire work in its
final stages and offered much-needed advice.
Many friends have made my time in Chicago warm and wonderful as
I’ve worked to bring this book to conclusion. The brilliant friendship of
Helen Thompson has sustained me. Anna Kornbluh has been a most excel-
lent reader and pal. I cannot imagine where I would be without Nathalie
Bouzaglo, Kasey Evans, Jane Springer, and Jade Werner. How are we not
sisters? John Alba Cutler has been the most lovely human being with whom
to share a train car on the tenure tracks. My father and stepmother, Barton
and Nancy Rohrbach, have been supportive of my work. My mother,
JoAnn Scott, takes on my desires as her own, and I know that she will be
happy, above all, that the book is finished. My brother and sister, Geoff
and Susie, have always had my back. This book owes something, too, to
my dog Rosie, who dutifully woke me at dawn every morning of my
fellowship year so I could get to work.
Tacita Dean answered my wildest dreams by granting me permission to
use her image of the salty book “The Book End of Time” for the cover.
A very early version of the argument of Chapter 4 appeared as “Austen’s
Later Subjects,” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 44.4 (Autumn
2004): 737–52. About a third of Chapter 2 was published as “Reading the
Heart, Reading the World: Keats’s Historiographical Aesthetic,” in Euro-
pean Romantic Review 25.3 (June 2014): 275–88.
At the University of Miami, Kathryn Freeman and Frank Stringfellow
introduced me to Jane Austen’s novels in courses on Romanticism and on