1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910814963103321

Autore

Rohrbach Emily

Titolo

Modernity's Mist : British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation / / Emily Rohrbach

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2015]

©2015

ISBN

0-8232-6800-4

0-8232-7244-3

0-8232-6799-7

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (200 p.)

Collana

Lit Z

Classificazione

LIT014000LIT004120HIS016000

Disciplina

820.9/145

820.9145

Soggetti

HISTORY / Historiography

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry

Poetics - History - 19th century

Poetics - History - 18th century

Literature and history - Great Britain - History - 19th century

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Time in literature

Literature and history - Great Britain - History - 18th century

English literature - 18th century - History and criticism

Romanticism - Great Britain

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: ON BEING IN A MIST -- 1. FROM PRECEDENTS TO THE UNPREDICTABLE: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL FUTURITIES -- 2. DIZZY ANTICIPATIONS: SONNETS BY KEATS (AND SHELLEY) -- 3. ACCOMMODATING SURPRISE: KEATS’S ODES -- 4. CONTINGENCIES OF THE FUTURE ANTERIOR: AUSTEN’S PERSUASION -- 5. THE “DOUBLE NATURE” OF PRESENTNESS: BYRON’S DON JUAN -- Notes -- Index



Sommario/riassunto

Modernity’s Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the “spirit of the age” increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—of uncertainty concerning what will have been. Romantic writers, she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity.