Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Revolutionary Romanticism?
This axiom of cultural history has long suggested intriguing connections between the politics of revolution and the history of artistic forms. Poets like William Blake, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron still provide us with compelling images of the artist as social outcast and political rebel. Yet the case of English romanticism also raises difficulties about the revolutionary paradigm, since the political expectations raised within Britain after 1789 tended to yield reaction and reform rather than revolution. Literary scholars have addressed this problem by suggesting that the major romantic poets were disenchanted or displaced revolutionaries, who transformed their disappointed political expectations into visionary art, and in doing so, helped inaugurate a distinctly modern sense of culture and the arts as a zone separate from ordinary experience.
HSC's Kevin Gilmartin, Professor of English, disagrees. He argues that the revolutionary model for romanticism tends to overlook the overwhelming counterrevolutionary presence within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture and society. No mere foil for romantic transcendence, conservative cultural movements were (paradoxically) a vigorous and effective force for social change. As the breeding ground for anxieties about literary conspiracy and the contamination of culture, these movements shaped emerging debates about the proper boundaries of the art — debates that are very much with us today as we argue our own culture wars. Conservative periodical reviews of the 1790s like the Anti-Jacobin and the British Critic were, for instance, particularly determined to reshape cultural life as a way of stabilizing social and political forms. They were able to contribute to important historical shifts in the meanings of "literature" and "culture" in part because they were convinced that political subversion appeared in imaginative form, as utopian fantasy and as undisciplined literary expression.
In Gilmartin's view, romanticism emerged within as well as against the reactionary politics of culture. In this sense, the revolutionary counterfactual that still haunts literary studies was ordained by the conservative movements of the 1790s.
Gilmartin maintains that the limits of particular disciplinary perspectives have contributed centrally to misunderstandings about the revolutionary politics of romanticism and that a more adequate account of the paradoxes of counterrevolutionary culture requires an interdisciplinary method. Literary scholars, for example, have misgauged reactionary culture in part because they have been distracted by the rhetorical brilliance of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and have interpreted the politics of romanticism within the narrow terms of a revolution controversy waged between Burke and Thomas Paine. And although historians have recently developed a more fluid sense of the polemical field in the 1790s, political history has its own limitations. In particular, the tendency to use evidence about state legal repression as a way of gauging the impact of conservatism has underestimated the constructive role of anti-radical movements, especially within the social and cultural sphere. Gilmartin's research draws on both literary and historical perspectives to reassess the politics of romantic expression. Poetry and fiction are very much at issue here, but so too are the popular reading habits, publishing enterprises, and legal restrictions that shaped literary endeavors. This more open and flexible interpretive method allows Gilmartin to see the way in which romanticism was shaped by a conservatism that sought to create loyal subjects as well as silence disloyal ones.
Gilmartin stresses that his aim in challenging the conventions of romantic studies is not to undermine the credibility of romantic art. On the contrary, he is persuaded of the undiminished power and influence of British romanticism, as evidenced by the way Caltech students still respond viscerally to its poetry and fiction. Instead, his research, carried out under the auspices of the HSC program and augmented by the rich archives of the Huntington Library, is constructive in its aims, an effort to produce a richer understanding of the precise historical conditions under which the romantic imagination emerged.
