EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON
LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND SABIRON (EDS) ROMANTICISM AND TIME
Romanticism and Time
Literary Temporalities
OBP
EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON
Romanticism and Time
This brilliantly conceived, exhilarating, and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential
reading for all those interested in taking the long view of the historical, literary, and
philosophical times of British Romanticism.
Pamela Clemitt, Queen Mary, University of London
Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international
exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent
scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the
“four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe
and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because
of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume
produce, as Wordsworth might say, a “timely utterance.”
Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley
This volume considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march
of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-
eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with
history in the making. Revising current thinking about periodisation, these essays survey
the Romantic canon’s evolution over time and approach Romanticism as a phenomenon
unfolding across national borders.
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Romanticism and Time
Literary Temporalities
Edited by
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron
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Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron
ix
Section I: Restoration, Revival, and Revolution across
Romantic Europe
1
1. ‘Future Restoration’
Paul Hamilton
3
2. ‘Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic
Poetry’
Evan Gottlieb
25
3. ‘Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations’
Gregory Dart
49
Section II: Romantic Conceptions of Time
75
4. ‘The Temporality of the Soul: Immanent Conceptions of
Time in Wordsworth and Byron’
Ralf Haekel
77
5. ‘“Footing slow across a silent plain”: Time and Walking
in Keatsian Poetics’
Oriane Monthéard
97
Section III: The Poetics of Time
119
6.
‘Contracting Time: John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar’
Lily Dessau
121
7. ‘Book-Time in Charles Lamb and Washington Irving’
Matthew Redmond
145
8. ‘“a disciple of Albertus Magnus [...] in the eighteenth
century”:Anachronism and Anachrony inFrankenstein’
Anne Rouhette
163
vi Romanticism and Time
Section IV: Persistence and Afterlives
181
9. ‘Heaps of Time in Beckett and Shelley’
Laura Quinney
183
10. ‘“Thy Wreck a Glory”: Venice, Subjectivity, and
Temporality in Byron and Shelley and the Post-Romantic
Imagination’
Mark Sandy
205
Section V: Romanticism and Periodisation
225
‘Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable’
David Du, Nicholas Halmi, Laurent Folliot, Martin Procházka, and
Fiona Staord
227
List of Contributors
273
List of Figures
279
Index
281
Acknowledgements
This book originates from an international conference on ‘Romanticism
and Time’ held at the Université de Lille in November 2018 and organised
jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA)
and the Universités de Lille and Lorraine. Our warm thanks go to the
SERA, who set this project in motion, and to the scientic committee of
the Romanticism and Time conference, Caroline Bertonèche, Mathieu
Duplay, Thomas Dutoit, Jean-Marie Fournier, and Marc Porée, for their
guidance. We are grateful to our institutions, the Université de Lille and
the Université de Lorraine, and, in particular, to our research centres
CÉCILLE
1
and IDEA
2
, who supported the project from the start. We
are particularly thankful to Marie-France Pilarski and Bruno Legrand
(Université de Lille) for their invaluable help throughout the project
and to Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell (Université de Lorraine) for welcoming
this project, as well as for her trust and support.
We are also grateful to Nicholas Roe and Ann Winnicombe for
granting us permission to reprint a revised version of section II from
Mark Sandy’s article in the Romanticism online issue on ‘Light’ (22. 3.
2016: https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0287). We would also like to
thank Sarah Wootton for permission to reprint revised parts of Mark
Sandy’s chapter from Venice and the Cultural Imagination (Abingdon and
New York: Pickering & Chatto, 2012) as well as Kostas Boyiopoulos and
Michael Shallcross for permission to reprint revised sections of Mark
Sandy’s essay in Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the Present (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2020). The research for Martin Procházka’s contribution
was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project
1 Univ. Lille, ULR 4074 – CECILLE – Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et
Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France.
2 Univ. Lorraine, UR 2338 – IDEA – Interdisciplinarité Dans les Études Anglophones,
F-54000 Nancy, France.
viii Romanticism and Time
‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an
Interrelated World’ (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/ 0000734). We are
deeply thankful to the Institut Universitaire de France who supported
the Romanticism and Time conference and this publication.
Finally, we would like to express our sincerest thanks and gratitude
to our contributors for committing their considerable talent, energy, and
enthusiasm to this project.
Introduction:
The Times of Romanticism
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
1
and Céline Sabiron
2
‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.
3
In this volume, we have decided to take Blake’s aphorism as an
invitation to see Romantic writing as a ‘production of time’; to look for
the work of time within Romantic literature. One of the aims of this
collection is to understand Romanticism as the product of its own time,
in its ability to reect history and in the emergence of its specic poetics
through time. Blake’s words can also be read as a meditation on poetics
unfolding ‘in time’: on poetic form as the product of rhyme and rhythm.
Yet, if we attend to the reversibility that characterises Blake’s ‘Proverbs
of Hell’, this aphorism also oers a vision of Romanticism as an active
‘production of time’, not only registering the passing of time but also
shaping conceptions of time and making history. Romantic writing then
also appears as an art of time, creating new representations of temporal
phenomena and generating new modes of time-consciousness. The
contributions in this collection, which includes a selection of revised
papers from the ‘Romanticism and Time’ conference as well as specially
1 Université de Lille and Institut Universitaire de France. Univ. Lille, ULR 4074—
CECILLE—Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Lettres Etrangères, F-59000
Lille, France and Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
2 Université de Lorraine. Univ. Lorraine, UR 2338—IDEA—Interdisciplinarité Dans
les Études Anglophones, F-54000 Nancy.
3 William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, l. 10, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake,
ed. by David Erdman (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 36.
© Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.12
x Romanticism and Time
commissioned essays,
4
are thus held together by the common ambition
to study Romantic writing as ‘authentically temporal’:
5
as a process in
time that displays a form of agency over time.
This collection explores the ways in which British Romantic literature
creates its own sense of time, from the end of the eighteenth century to
the mid-nineteenth century, from William Blake, William Wordsworth,
John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, to John Clare and Samuel
Rogers, raising the question of the evolution of the Romantic canon
over time. The presence of poets such as Clare and Rogers, who eluded
academia’s eld of vision for so long, exposes our own temporal
locatedness as academics. It gestures towards the writers who still elude
that eld of vision and towards those who are surreptitiously drifting
out of it. The essays are bound by a common approach to the creative
relations Romanticism entertains with the notion of time, with an
emphasis on poetry.
6
It aims at oering a reection on the role of poetic
writing as a mode of perception of time. The Romantics explored the
possibilities opened up by poetry as a form of time, as experiences of
time were reected but also took shape within poetic forms.
Nevertheless, the scope of this collection is not limited to the realm
of poetry. The anities between temporality and narrative, but also
between temporality and the order of reason in essay-writing manifest
themselves in the multiple temporalities of prose.
7
This is why this
volume also looks into the temporalities of Romantic novels and essays,
from Mary Shelley to Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Furthermore,
some of our contributors were particularly sensitive to the Romantics’
eager exploration of other forms of artistic manipulation of time, and
4 The conference was held in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French
Society for the Study of British Romanticism and by the Universités de Lille and
Lorraine, with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France.
5 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,
2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 206.
6 For a wide-ranging, and yet very detailed, introduction to Romantic poetry analysed
in its larger social, cultural, geographical and political contexts, see Fiona Staord,
Reading Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), https://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118228104
7 See for instance Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, I. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris:
Seuil, 1983) and Jacques Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir
(Paris: Seuil, 1992).
xi
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
to their tropism towards music in particular, hence the place given to
Beethoven’s Fidelio in Section I.
Few have attempted to consider the various temporalities of
Romanticism as a form of cross-fertilisation between nations, with
the notable exception of Martin Procházka, Nicholas Halmi and Paul
Hamilton,
8
also contributors to this volume. We share their ambition
to study the Romantic poetics of history as a European phenomenon.
As ‘a literature that represents its own uid conditions of becoming’,
9
Romanticism is also a process in time, constructed by various generations
of artists and critics in a complex dynamic of transience and persistence.
With the aim of confronting British Romanticism with some of its later
European counterparts, some chapters explore the dialogues between
Byron and Nietzsche, and between Shelley and Beckett. Challenging
the linearity of deterministic conceptions of inuence, Romantic texts
experiment with creative modes of intertextuality, inventing their
origins and imagining their legacies. This volume thus oers a vision of
Romanticism as a moment of ‘obstinate questionings’ of the temporalities
of literature,
10
as its uncanny persistence into later literary movements
generates turbulence in the course of traditional literary history.
In its various instantiations in time and across borders, Romanticism
‘denes itself through a process of self-dissemination which leaves each
moment of its instantiation characteristically fragmentary’,
11
raising
epistemological questions for the eld of literary studies and its reliance
on periodisation. The proceedings of the roundtable ‘Romanticism and
Periodisation’, edited by David Du, interrogate our critical practices,
8 See in particular Martin Procházka’s 2005 comparative studies of European,
American and Czech Romanticism in Romantismus a romantismy (Romanticism
and Romanticisms), ed. by Martin Procházka and Zdeněk Hrbata (Nakladatel:
Karolinum, 2005); Nicholas Halmi’s The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199212415.001.0001, in which he pointed at the interrelation between
German philosophically-minded Romanticists and English poets like Wordsworth
or Shelley in their wish to re-enchant the world; and Paul Hamilton, Realpoetik:
European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686179.001.0001
9 Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.1017/
cbo9780511720031
10 Percy Shelley, ‘Alastor’, l. 26, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald Reiman and
Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 74.
11 Hamilton, Realpoetik, p. 7.
xii Romanticism and Time
and fascination for Romantic presences, persistence, and legacies.
12
In
its ability to bend the course of literary chronologies, Romanticism thus
appears as essentially untimely.
This volume looks for Romanticism as a movement out of time:
generated by and precipitating the acceleration of history. The close
readings here trace the ways in which Romantic ‘time disseminates
itself’
13
into widely varying scales, paces, and planes, in an age of
political, industrial, and epistemological revolutions. Such a ‘vertiginous
temporality’
14
manifests itself in scalar discrepancies, from the span
of a lifetime to unfathomable geological and astronomical sequences,
especially in the passage from the timeless and tabular representation
of a Linnean nature to the more arrow-like conception of time in pre-
evolutionist theories. The emergence of Romanticism corresponds
to the moment when geological time and human time collide, ‘as the
Anthropocene simultaneously forces human and planetary timescales
together and undoes our longstanding belief in the priority of the
former over the latter’ (Evan Gottlieb). The experience of time takes
varying paces: from the time of agricultural labour embedded in the
cycles of nature to the capitalist time of feverish production and constant
consumption. The epistemology of time is fragmented into competing
paradigms and elds of knowledge, between the poles of Kantian time
as an a priori intuition and Newtonian time, with its undierentiated
ow and homogenous course.
The Romantic poetics of time reects that dissemination. It bears
witness to ‘a disconnection and out-of-jointness’ at work within
12 Several recent publications oer a vision of ‘Romanticism as a mode rather than
a genre of writing’ (The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, ed.
by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 1,
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203110096), thus partly freeing Romanticism from
periodisation. See also Michael O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and
Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.001.0001, Romantic
Presences in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Mark Sandy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606958, and Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era,
ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315243917
13 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000), p. 43, our translation.
14 Joel Faak, ed., Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto and Bualo:
University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 14, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442699595
xiii
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
chronological time.
15
Contained in Shelley’s ‘We look before and
after, /And pine for what is not—’
16
is that sense of an elusive present
caught in the constant tension between past and future, between the
poles of anamnesis and prophecy. Romantic temporality thus lies
in the ‘co-existence of distinct timelines’ (Anne Rouhette) upsetting
what Rancière calls ‘the self-coincidence of time’.
17
It emerges within
the discrepancy between a ‘transformational instant’ (Gregory Dart)
and the longue durée of history, within a ‘multiplicity of temporal lines,
[with] several senses of time experienced at the “same” time’.
18
This
multilinear experience takes shape in the tension between the sense of
time rooted in ‘the manifold quirks and variations of lived experience’
(Matthew Redmond) and the otherness of non-subjective temporalities.
Romantic texts allow for embodied experiences of time to emerge:
time eshes itself out within the ‘body as a temporal medium’ (Oriane
Monthéard). Poetic time encounters biological time: the opaque, often
undecipherable temporality at work within the human body, its vital
rhythms and its course towards ageing and death.
Blake’s meditation, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of
time’, challenges the mutual exclusion of the transient and the timeless.
Romantic literature has sometimes been seen as cultivating the belief
‘that poetry by its nature can transcend the conicts and transiences
of this time and that place’,
19
trying to avoid the wounds of time’s
arrow in a tropism towards timelessness. Yet, in the words of Giorgio
Agamben, ‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to
their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust
themselves to its demands. [...] But precisely because of this condition,
precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are
more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time’.
20
Romantic writers endeavour to bring about a new distribution of the
15 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and other
Essays, ed. and trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), pp. 39–54 (p. 40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503600041-004
16 Percy Shelley, ‘To a Sky-Lark’, lines 86–87, in Poetry and Prose, p. 306.
17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien’, L’Inactuel, 6
(Fall 1996), 53–68 (p. 67), our translation.
18 Ibid.
19 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 69.
20 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 40.
xiv Romanticism and Time
transient and the timeless by conferring on poetry a temporality that
sees beyond current events and that bears the responsibility of political
change. This collection considers the Romantic poetics of time less as a
drive towards atemporal transcendence than as the record of a ‘falling
into time’ (Ralf Haekel).
21
It has chosen to look at Romanticism in time:
embedded in time and reecting on history. The close readings in this
volume explore less the historiographical ambitions than the poetics
of history in Romantic writing, ‘envisioning anew the role that poetic
forms and stylistic techniques play […] in the way Romantic literature
engages with history’.
22
Our aim is not to see Romantic poems as merely
reactive to the course of events, but as creative engagements with
history in the making. Romanticism was immersed in its own time, yet
not passively so, inventing ‘new modes of historical consciousness’ and
making history.
23
Rather than investigating the Romantic poetics of history as a
memorial art, this volume focuses on what ‘permits the private space
of the self entrance into those monumental moments recorded by, and
for, history’ (Mark Sandy). In the same way, the Romantic ambition to
attend to the ‘shadows which futurity casts upon the present’
24
is seen
in this book as part of an endeavour to change the course of events. In
the words of Ian Balfour, ‘Prophecy is a call and a claim much more than
it is a prediction, a call oriented toward a present that is not present’.
25
In the politics of Romanticism, prophecy is part of the will to shape the
present: to liberate the ecacy of poetry and set the forces of history in
motion.
That ability to envision futurity takes place in a moment of latency, as
it awakens new political aspirations. According to Richard Eldridge, that
moment, in between the promise of advent and indenite deferral, is the
temporality of political freedom: ‘This sense of simultaneous direction
toward and deferral of the achievement of freedom accounts for the
21 No page number is indicated for references to the chapters in this volume.
22 Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 15, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.
ctt175x2fs
23 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511519437
24 Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Poetry and Prose, p. 535.
25 Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), p. 18.
xv
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
predominance in Romantic writing of remembrance and anticipation
rather than of present statement of the features of things’,
26
revealing
the political import of the Romantic poetics of time. The Romantics’
conception of futurity involves their commitment to envision the future
in a dark present. In the words of Paul Hamilton, Romantic writing
reveals ‘the interwoven quality of the future in past and present’.
The Romantic poetics of time thus transforms time from the inside,
upsetting chronologies, introducing loops and detours, shaking the
foundations of a ‘temporal economy […] of the sort implied in the
concept of linear time’ (Laura Quinney). Taking an active part in the
‘essential dishomogeneity’ of its times,
27
Romanticism refracts rather
than merely reects time. The Romantic poetics of time also redistributes
origins and aftermaths when posterity becomes a driving force and a
process of origination: ‘For the Romantics, […] posterity is not so much
what comes after poetry as its necessary prerequisite—the judgement of
future generations becomes the necessary condition of the act of writing
itself’.
28
Romantic poetics thus open up various lines of time, disjointing
and combining temporal layers within the play of literary language:
‘dividing and interpolating time, [the poet] is capable of transforming
it and putting it in relation with other times’.
29
In order to attend to time
in the making in Romantic texts, this volume looks into their ability to
interweave various lines of time.
Romanticism is sometimes seen as dismissive of a clockwork
conception of time that divides the continuum of temporal experience
into a series of discrete units. Romantic poetics consists less in the
rejection of quantiable and linear time than in the subversion of its
homogeneity based on the return of identical units. The Romantic
poetics of time introduces dierence within patterns of repetition, when
poetic rhythm creates other forms of periodicity. Hence the swirling
movement guiding the breath of the Spirit of the Hour in Prometheus
Unbound: ‘Thou breathe into the many-folded Shell,/Loosening its
26 Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, Essays in Philosophy and Literature
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 21.
27 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 52.
28 Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511484100
29 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 53.
