While that most famous of Romantic partnerships, between Wordsworth and Coleridge, defines for many readers and scholars the idea of literary collaboration, the conference on Romantic Couplings that took place on 27 March 1999 at the University of Sheffield sought to demystify and to open up the notion of pairing and to explore less well-travelled ground. All four essays engage with the ramifications of coupling, textually, generically, sexually, and editorially. All four ask readers to see collaboration and pairing as an intimate, exposing process. Moreover, as the essays here suggest, many couples also interfere with each other, physically and textually. The essays in this issue revolve around the idea of intercourse, of conversation and interaction, a specifically mutual enterprise.
Influence is only part of the project.
However, what it leaves out is the possibility of shared fortunes, of cross-influence, of equal footing. What it points out is the contradictory nature of a position like Wordsworth's, whose work has been for so long the template for Romanticism. While Wordsworth may not have been able to reconcile his ideals of equality with his need for authority, it does not necessarily follow that isolation and solipsism underpin the Romantic period. The very ease with which couples can be named suggests that perhaps partnership, in a variety of forms, is more the basis for 'Romanticism'. A new, more collaborative Romanticism chimes, of course, with the current critical and institutional emphasis on interdisciplinarity, an emphasis designed to facilitate the sharing of resources as well as the meeting of minds.