Romantic Subjectivity

Abstract

It was the various ethical, moral and psychological interests of the Romantic and post-Romantic writers which led to the modernist repudiation of their work as something of an artistic disaster. Consistently, both proponents and critics of Realist fiction and poetry had dealt with literature as if its value lay in its veracity, its faithfulness to certain experiences and social facts. When the modernist reaction took place, the first object of attack was the ‘seriousness’ of the Victorian writer-sage; the next was the wrong-headed preoccupation of critics with the life and opinions of the writer instead of with the discourse, the rhetoric of the work he produced, the writer’s ‘literature’ — literature without contents such as was thought by some critics to have flourished in the days before Locke and company upset the apple cart. In fact, we nowhere locate the hypostatised literature without contents, existing for itself alone. In each case, we find that there is present, either avowedly or subtensively, a content, transpersonal, shared, societal. Whether or not the writer uses such contents to say something else, the content is always present: Dante’s cosmology, Milton’s wish ‘to justify the ways of God to men’, Shakespeare’s themes of power and kinship, death.