New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray teaches English at the University of
Western Ontario.

This collection of 10 essays is intended to reflect the current state of
Romantic studies in the wake of deconstruction and poststructuralist
theory. The editors posit the text’s “self-conscious
historical-theoretical situation” as “Post-poststructuralism,”
stating that the authors are not reading Romantic literature through
contemporary theory, but rather employing critical theory to discover
“the distinct ways in which Romanticism theorizes and examines itself
from within.”

The wide variety of methodologies and critical approaches among the
essays mirrors and demonstrates the plurality of Romanticism itself, as
emphasized in the volume’s introduction. As the editors observe, such
a complexity of responses characterizes the resistance that
poststructuralism introduced into the hegemonic claims of unifying
ideology in earlier Romantic scholarship. From the feminism of Jean
Wilson’s examination of women’s Romantic writing, to the new
historicism of Alan Bewell’s formalist reading of Keat’s floral
imagery, these essays reflect the broad critical diversity of current
Romantic theory. Rather than seeking to create, or even postulate, a new
postmodern ideology of Romanticism that unites the various critical
approaches, the editors intend to highlight the tensions and conflicts
within Romantic studies, just as the authors explore the tensions at
work within the texts themselves, thereby demonstrating that “the
Romantic text is ... characterized by multiple strands of significance
which entwine but do not build towards a syntheses.”

Of particular interest is that the editors have deliberately selected
authors who have completed their doctoral studies within the past 20
years; thus, all of the contributors have developed their critical
stances during a period in which poststructuralism was shaking up the
academic establishment. The editors present these authors as the
representatives of the new generation of Romantic scholars, writing in
the critical light of such early Canadian luminaries as Northrop Frye
and Milton Wilson, but focused, unlike their predecessors, on la
difference.