Title: Modernity's Mist : British Romanticism and the poetics of anticipation /
Authors: Rohrbach, Emily,
Year: 2016
Subjects: Romanticism Great Britain; English literature History and criticism; Literature and history Great Britain History; Time in literature.; English literature History and criticism; Literature and history Great Britain History; Poetics History; Poetics History; LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry.; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.; HISTORY / Historiography.; English literature; Literature and history; Poetics.; Romanticism; Time in literature.; Great Britain
Abstract: "Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas scholarship has often focused on Romanticism's relations to the past, emphasizing ruins, memory, and mourning, Modernity's Mist situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--a time when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. At the very moment that the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the sense of speed and unpredictability rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity's Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority or the uncertainty of "what will have been": a poetics of anticipation for an age that was--politically, socially, and aesthetically--on the move. While literary historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity's Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. And it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetics of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity"--
Contents: Machine generated contents note: 1.From Precedents to the Unpredictable: Historiographical Futurities -- 2.Dizzy Anticipations: Sonnets by Keats (and Shelley) -- 3.Accommodating Surprise: Keats's Odes -- 4.Contingencies of the Future Anterior: Austen's Persuasion -- 5.The "Double Nature" of Presentness: Byron's Don Juan.