Those damn'd Romantics

In my grad seminar, "The Gothic Century," we are learning that Romantic scholars want to extend the beginning of their era from 1798 to 1750, eschewing all differences in between those dates that characterize those dates. As I take it from Susan J. Wolfson in "50-50? Phone a Friend? Ask the Audience? Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750-1850," part of the force behind extending the Romantic era is a discipline-related issue: fewer universities hire straight-up Romantics, but instead hire specialists in the long-eighteenth century. Thus, if Romantics can force themselves into the long-eighteenth century somehow, their era (and their job) is preserved. How political. My real concern here is with statements like, "eighteenth-century scholars have as a rule been uninterested in fiction written after Fielding and Richardson" (Claudia L. Johnson, "The Novel and the Romantic Century, 1750-1850" italics mine). As a rule? That seems both exaggerated and incorrect. As an Austen scholar, Johnson's views seem oriented by Austen's position in the eighteenth-century, and while she celebrates that Austen was "(gladly) ceded back to eighteenth-century studies" (thankfully, I agree), later-century writers only wrote about "girlie things, like manners" (15). She says that Sam Johnson got the boot, and is "no longer used as a way of organizing ... the period" (15). She ends by returning to what Wolfson opened with: reformation of the era is for hiring opportunity. But, the extension of the Romantic era asks the question, does Romanticism even exist?

For me, I find it bizarre to call Austen "pre-Victorian" as much as I find it bizarre to call Thomas Warton, Oliver Goldsmith, or even Horace Walpole "pre-Romantic." If the "Romantic Century" begins in 1750, what do we make of Gray, Sterne, Boswell, Equiano, Burke, Barbauld? These writers are distinct from the project of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which has thus far been the place mark of Romanticism. I'm just not buying this whole thing. Certain preoccupations were brought to the writing table that are uniquely mid-century oriented. Yes, Gray is an early voice of the fascination with the morose, solitary, and (unknowingly) psychological, but to say he is a pre-Romantic takes him out of his context and hands him over to an era affected by Revolution, regency, industrial/scientific developments, and urbanite-occupations. Not the nostalgic, neo-classical, anxious, naive, and authorial culture to which he belongs. IF ANYTHING, we should call the Romantics post-Sensibility. If Burke's Sublime is the treatise of the era, especially in the Gothic mode, then perhaps the Romantics were looking back to mid-century to position themselves with a particular aesthetic and sociocultural agenda; Burke was not looking ahead to plain language, ghosts, and the women's right to write. Give me a break.

Sources:

Johnson, Claudia L. "The Novel and the Romantic Century, 1750-1850" European Romantic Review 1 (2000) 12-20.

Wolfson, Susan J. "50-50? Phone a Friend? Ask the Audience? Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750-1850" European Romantic Review 1 (2000) 1-11.