Romanticism and Periodisation

Abstract

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations.This book originates from an international conference on 'Romanticism and Time' held at the Université de Lille in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA) and the Universités de Lille and Lorraine. Our warm thanks go to the SERA, who set this project in motion, and to the scientific committee of the Romanticism and Time conference,

Change time: Timing and placing late Romanticism

“…Late Romanticism extends and intensifies one of the few unifying characteristics of Romanticism; that is, its insistence on itself as a period. Romanticism may be “diffuse in its origins and […] differentiated in its national and regional manifestations” (Duff et al., 2021, p. 272), and deeply aware of this diffusion and differentiation, but it also understands itself to represent a moment that is fundamentally dissimilar from what has gone before, and thereby grants itself circular coherence as “the age of the spirit of the age.” (Chandler, 1998, p. 105) Late Romanticism reinforces this habit of historicity in that it presents as a period within a period; a subperiod that perpetuates but complicates and modulates Romantic ideas and ideals. Late Romanticism, then, as Geoffrey Hartman remarks of Wordsworth's later poetry, stages a series of “strange happenings” and bestows upon itself “a peculiarity all its own” (1987, p. 331).…”