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Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. This book goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. The author explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.

This book contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and have viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of the Romantics' late work as evidence of declining abilities. The author of this book argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model which adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.

How can Romantic poetry, motivated by the poet’s intense yearning to impart his thoughts and feelings, be so often difficult and the cause of readerly misunderstanding? How did it come to be that a poet can compose a verbal artwork, carefully and lovingly put together, and send it out into the world at the same time that he is adopting a stance against communication? This book addresses these questions by showing that the period’s writers were responding to the beginnings of our networked world of rampant mediated communication. The Connected Condition reveals that major Romantic poets shared a great attraction and skepticism toward the dream of perfectible, efficient connectivity that has driven the modern culture of communication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats all experimented with their artistic medium of poetry to pursue such ideals of speedy, transparent communication at the same time that they tried out contrarian literary strategies: writing excessively ornate verse, prolonging literary reading with tedious writing, being obscure, and questioning the allure of quickly delivered information. This book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living in—and living with—the connected condition, as well as the fortunes of literature in it.

This book argues that the repressions of the British government had a constitutive role in the formation of early Romantic-era writing. At stake in this argument is a reinvestigation of a model of the period’s literary history that finds the democratic energy of British culture in the early 1790s speedily dissipating as the Parisian scene grows violent, turning most supporters of the revolution into its opponents with the killing of Louis XVI in 1793. In this narrative, those who continued to support the revolutionary cause went underground, while many familiar writers turned to aesthetic escapism or reactionary conservatism. But this account assumes an atmosphere in which writers felt able to write (and find publishers for) anything they pleased, and that within this Habermasian idyll previously progressive writers abruptly chose to abandon their political ideals. This book reassess this narrative for what it misses and for what it loses. Both well- and lesser-known writers of the period, while publishing work that cautiously engaged the historical moment, were more forthcoming in their diaries, letters, and other unpublished writing. This archive, which pulses with the democratic energy of the early 1790s, casts a powerful illumination on the work that these authors did choose to publish later in the decade. The exclamations of fear, explanations of self-censorship, and urgings to caution in these manuscripts help us to recognize the political charge of the poetics of gagging that marks so much early Romantic-era writing.

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Romantic Intimacy is a study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth century psychoanalysis. The term “intimacy”—which has always referred both to the inmost and personal, and to relationships of exceptional closeness—captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience, and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Austen show how aspirations toward mutual recognition give way to appreciation of varied, non-reciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Romantic Intimacy explores how philosophical confidence in fellow-feeling and sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth and nineteenth century culture, as well as for literary theorists.

This book argues that the concept of “attention” became particularly unhinged at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain, oscillating widely between disciplines—from theology to pedagogy, from philosophy to science, and most forcefully, from poetics to the rhetoric and practices of war. Reading Romanticism as a poetics of attention brings into view the way that Romantic poetry experiments with the rhythms of attention and its lapse, and reveals a Romantic understanding of the experience of reading as fundamentally shaped by the claims made on attention by pedagogy, medicine, science, ethics, aesthetics, theology, and the military. Through close readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Wordsworth, Watchwords uncovers a strain of poetics especially concerned with the militarization of attention, a poetics that defines itself and its reader’s attention as a resistance to, and reconfiguration of, the vigilance demanded by war. The book traces the ethical, affective, political, and literary contours of attention at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain to find the interdisciplinary stakes of a literature of mere looking, a poetics of the simple act of noticing what is overlooked. The minimal posture of looking away, or looking differently, emerges as a response to a political crisis in attention precipitated by the pervasive demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch for a French invasion. While Romantic poetry criticizes this political watchfulness, it also maintains unexpected debts to the forms of apprehension and vulnerability prompted by war.