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This wide-ranging book explores the generic innovations that drive the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, epic, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' as well as a revolutionary movement.
About the author
David Duff studied in York and taught in Poland at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun and the University of Gdansk before moving to Scotland. He has published widely on Romantic poetics and book history. His previous publications include Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994), an anthology of Modern Genre Theory (2000), and a co-edited collection, Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism and The Oxford Anthology of Romanticism, a major new teaching anthology.
Summary
This wide-ranging and original book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romanticism. Analyzing numerous examples from 1760 to 1830, David Duff examines the generic innovations and experiments which propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drives to 'make it old' and to 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical writing of the period as well as its creative literature.
Incorporating extensive research on classification systems and reception history as well as on literary forms themselves, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre demonstrates how new ideas about the role and status of genre influenced not only authors but also publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The focus is on poetry, but a wider spectrum of genres is considered, a central theme being the relationship - hierarchical, competitive, combinatory - between genres. Among the topics addressed are generic primitivism and forgery; Enlightenment theory and the 'cognitive turn'; the impact of German transcendental aesthetics; organic and anti-organic form; the role of genre in the French Revolution debate; the poetics of the fragment; and the theory and practice of genre-mixing.
Unprecedented in its scope and detail, this important book establishes a new way of reading Romantic literature which brings into focus for the first time its tangled relationship with genre.
Additional text
Anyone interested in a careful and fair-minded assessment of neoclassical genre criticism and the intellectual heirs and rebels it produced would do well to consult this book; and even scholars familiar with the field might make surprising discoveries about texts or interconnections they had not previously considered.
