Introduction

Abstract

The title of this book raises an immediate problem. Do we, in fact, teach Romanticism at all? After all, criticism of the last three decades has tended to be suspicious of the notion of Romanticism as a coherent force that somehow binds together the literature and/or culture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, earlier scholarly constructions of Romanticism have been subject to sustained critique, principally for valorizing the masculine sublime at the expense of the other forms of consciousness and writing. Would it not be more accurate to have entitled this book “Teaching Literature of the Romantic Period”, or even “Teaching Literature from c.1780 to c.1830”? Perhaps, and yet Romanticism, even when it is being interrogated, still has a certain power in critical parlance, in teaching literature of the period, and, indeed, in the academic literary marketplace. It is a term that the discipline may find troubling, indefinable, and potentially exclusionary, and yet, perhaps for those very reasons, it simply will not go away. We have therefore decided, after some consideration, to use “Romanticism” in the title of the book and in various parts of the text, with the proviso that we are well aware that the term is highly problematic. In fact, whenever “Romanticism” is used, it should be understood as being placed into question; a project taken on explicitly by several chapters of this book. The reader who is troubled by the monolithic implications of “Romanticism” may, therefore, wish to read it as “Romanticism?”, “Romanticism”, or “Romanticisms.” For, above all, the essays in this book reveal the rich variety of the literature of the period.