Reviews

Abstract

Over the past 30 years — since pioneering work by Frank Kermode, Robert Langbaum, Northrop Frye, and, more recently, new studies of influence by Harold Bloom and others — we have come to doubt not just the strident rhetoric characterising much earlier modernist criticism but the very anti-romanticism on which it staked its claims. The fierce attack, led by T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, upon ‘ wet ’ romantic sloppiness of thought and feeling now seems increasingly misguided. When directed against the decadent fin-de-siécle version of romanticism, that attack was certainly deserved; when used to discredit the entire romantic tradition, such criticism is crude, distorting and insensitive. There is nothing sloppy or sentimental about the major Romantics writing at the height of their powers, nor was the tough rhetoric of modernist criticism always intelligently thought through. Literary movements and changes in the climate of taste do not lend themselves to neat classification: we now recognise in the very modernist movement itself the centrality of not only the much-touted neo-classicist reaction against romanticism but also the vital transformation of romantic principles and practice. From Kermode to Bloom and Bornstein, the literary map has been redrawn, in some cases with startling, radical and far-reaching consequences.