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Bethany Nowviskie
mowvibp4@wfu.edu
Wake Forest University
The Romantic movement may be best defined by its very resistance to the limitation of a single definition. Romantic writing, like the historic period itself, encompassed so wide a variety of political and artistic aims as to make a single critical persp ective an impossibility. The complexity of this body of texts compels even those who view it superficially to distinguish the romanticisms of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge from those of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and to effectively polarize the moveme nt into two "generations" of poets. Relations between Romantic period artists, however, are considerably more involved and varied than may be represented in simplistic schemata. They constitute, instead, a vast complex of styles, influences, concerns, reactions, and aesthetic standpoints, and extend far beyond the major icons into a realm occupied by lesser-known poets (often women), essayists and critics, politicians, and artists. It seems to be only since the close of the nineteenth century that the infinite variety of Romanticism has been subsumed into a generalized pedagogy. The Romantic culture itself revelled in its diversity, attacking "received ideas of uniformity, standardization, and universality with... a program which set the highest value upon the unique, the peculiar, the local" (McGann 1983, 31). The development of such a program suggests a high degree of internal consciousness within the literate community of the period. The Romantic movement, therefore, must be seen as a studied combination of works, styles, historic acts, artistic aims, and social goals -- essentially as a continuing and boundless conversation among thinkers. Its shared context and collective emphasis on issues of sensibility gave this conversation what Jerome McGann has described as "a tendency to seek its unity in its div ersities, its sameness in its differences" (McGann 1993, xxi). This impulse manifested itself both in poetry and in contemporary criticism: it is that which, for example, informed Wordsworth's reading of the universe as an organic whole, empowered by "something far more deeply interfused," which dwells both in nature and in the mind of man, "that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things" ("Tintern Abbey," 97-103).
The integrative drive is also that which enabled Hazlitt to identify a particular "Spirit of the Age," an awareness that, depite their diversity, his subjects were all participants in a shared culture. M. H. Abrams, in an essay which adopts Hazlitt's ti tle, asserts the "shared qualities" of Romantic writing that make it form "a distinct complex," despite the presence of "many very individual poets, who wrote poems manifesting a greater diversity... than those of any preceeding age" (Abrams, 315). The " distinct complex" of the Romantic movement exists as a set of intertextual relations -- a conversation -- through which writers respond both to each other and to the culture in which they find themselves. It is telling that the seminal work of Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, is itself a collaborative effort.
The clear impulse toward unity, found within the movement itself, often tempts modern critics, editors, and instructors to present an oversimplified picture of Romanticism. Treatments which define it solely as a unified, semi-political response to the ideological impact of the French Revolution, or as a cult of sensibility in opposition to an earlier idealization of reason, limit the range of this far-reaching cultural trend. Students of the Romantic period are thereby left with a neatly-packaged, but unduly limited, vision of the age. However, it is not alone an (entirely reasonable) desire for clarity in criticism or the pressures and expediencies of the classroom which tend to deny the Romantic movement its complexity: the very medium in which we study the poetry and prose of this volatile period is inherently limiting. As a fundamentally static instrument, conventional print is not fully equipped to properly support discussion of a subject so diverse, mutable, interwoven, and contextual. Romanticism itself calls out for a new, more internally-appropriate, basis on which to construct a modern critical perspective. The comfortable and conventional medium of print must be displaced if we are to approach a more empathetic, more fitting treatment of the movement.
Printed anthologies, biographies, and works of social and literary criticism are subject to the boundaries of space and linear construction, and are ultimately limited to the material which can be contained between the covers of a book. Diversity and artistic interaction -- two of the hallmarks of Romanticism -- are notoriously difficult to address in the printed media. The finest single piece of criticism may adequately treat only a finite number of texts, and even an anthology must remain bound by a n editor's choices for inclusion -- choices often based on arbitrary limits and quotas. The physical constraints of books, too, restrict their subjects to those which can be adequately expressed in words and two-dimensional images. Creating full and vibrant context is, therefore, a difficulty inherent in the printed form.
The limitations of linearity, so familiar as to exist unnoticed in modern scholarship, also restrict the degree to which contextual and intertextual relationships may be addressed. Print dictates that a writer develop a single argument, or series of arg uments, which moves in linear progression from the title page to the close of a book. Espen Aarseth's 1994 article, "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory," addresses this issue by defining printed material as "a fixed sequence of constituents (beginning, middle, and end) that cannot change" (53). While such a system is certainly well-designed for the production of clear, considered theories, it may tend to direct some arguments in ways which deny complex inter-relations between various artists and works. This, of course, is not to say that intertextuality is seldom addressed in modern, printed literary criticism, but rather that it appears as the result of a conscious effort on the part of the critic -- not as a state inherent in the body of original texts and commentaries themselves. The effects of linearity on scholarly work go far beyond the mere "ritual of use" with which readers approach printed words (Aarseth, 67). Linear text includes, in addition to its consecutive reasoning and progressional phras es, a structure which often relegates connected works to the (literally) marginal realm of footnotes.
The desire for clarity in printed material also seems to dictate an author-centered approach to the study of Romanticism, an approach which necessarily limits the degree to which interaction among writers and texts may be addressed. While most individual treatments of particular poets are to be commended, as they provide us with an intensity of focus that enriches our readings of Romantic period texts, it is their very ubiquity which makes them problematic. The proliferation of author-centered treatme nts of Romanticism denies appreciation of the movement as a connected group of cultural phenomenona, and truly threatens to approach the egotistical sublime.
Linearity, spatial and logistical limitations, and the desire for simplicity and clarity tend to result in a compromised ability to treat poems as the socio-cultural artifacts that they are. Instead, these proclivities of the printed media sometimes generate a fetishization of texts and a denial of the importance of the artistic scene in which they took part. Students are often, therefore, arbitrarily circumscribed in their realization of the amount and diversity of active participants in the Romantic movement. They are encouraged to emphasize those poets whom time and taste have designated important, leaving, however, the contemporaries of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats by the wayside. Poets like Sir William Jones, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and the Della Cruscans -- fairly prominent, popular, and influential in their own day -- seldom enter into the modern classroom or printed anthology. The Romantic movement is strained through the critical perspectives of more than a century, and warped to fit the medium in which we continue to publish. The typical system by which we approach Romanticism is, therefore, inconsistent with the subject itself. How could it be otherwise, as it is based on artificial methods of organization and presentation? A notable exception to this tendency to disregard the internal ideologies and dynamics of the movement is Jerome McGann's recent anthology, Romantic Period Verse. The volume is an attempt, from within the conventions of the printed media, to canvass Romanticism on its own terms by including a broad representation of the poetry that was actually being read between the years 1785 and 1832. By presenting the texts in order of publication, rather than in groupings by author or form, McGann succeeds in reconstructing fifty years' worth of cultural conversation. The Romantic movement regains its impetus as a series of poetic assertions, responses, visions, and revisions.
It is precisely this sort of interaction among poets and texts -- a continuing conversation -- which so closely characterizes the movement. Therefore, the very nature of Romanticism demands a new scholarly medium, one which makes internally-appropriate editorial work the norm rather than the exception. We are in need of a means of organizing texts and contextual information in ways which permit them to maintain the easy inter-connections they enjoyed when they were new. Print, with all of its inherent limitations, seems to be largely incapable of supporting this kind of broad-scale critical shift. There exists, however, an electronic publishing system so perfectly suited to the Romantic condition as to seem ideal. That system, hypertext, is now rea dily available and should become the basis on which modern Romantic period scholarship is built.
George Landow, whose extensive work with electronic texts and their effects on the humanities easily qualifies him as one of the foremost thinkers in this new field, defines hypertext simply as "an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them" (Landow 1994, 1). He goes on to describe hypertext systems in startlingly Romantic terms, as "essentially poetic machines -- machines that work according to analogy and association, machines th at capture the anarchic brilliance of human imagination" (Landow 1992, 17-18). Hypertext offers us a network in which poems themselves may be electronically linked to one another, to information concerning their authors and the historical, social, and artistic contexts in which they existed, to their original sources and the writin g they later influenced, to modern critical interpretations, and to a potentially limitless amount of multimedia material. By virtue of their very structures, hypertext systems ensure that no single work can be fully divorced from its contextual position , and that no bit of information can become static or disassociated. An unlimited number of images, sound recordings, critical notes, and entire texts may be entered into a computer and linked together in such a way that the push of a button could presen t readers with a myriad of ideological affinities between participating elements of the Romantic culture. This not only allows poems to regain their specific socio-cultural locations; it also renews them as dynamic forms, reminding us that a text itself is not a definitive absolute, but rather "a process of becoming" (Robinson, 272). Peter Robinson's 1993 article, Redefining Critical Editions, outlines the great power of electronic publishing for dealing with contextual relations and multiple versions of medieval works. The same is undoubtedly true for Romantic period texts. Poems which exist in two widely-accepted versions, such as The Prelude, "The Ruined Cottage," or "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," immediately present themselves, but the possibilities for re-envisioning serialized works like Don Juan are perhaps even more exciting.
The central premise on which the transferral of Romantic period scholarship from print to hypertext stands is that stated by Michel Foucault. The "frontiers of a book," he writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge, "are never clear-cut" because "it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network" (23). Hypertext seems to be the ideal medium for presenting the major and minor works of Romanticism as "nodes within a network." As a network itself, this electronic publishing system offers scholars a ready-made structure in which to transplant both the objects of their study and their own critical work. It is a dynamic setting wholly appropriate to the dynamic and intertextual nature of Romantic literary culture.
Hypertext would prevent the author-centeredness all too common in printed anthologies, allowing us instead to view texts by the major Romantics as individual creations, while at the same time giving other related and less-known works their due. For example, a computer user could elect to read a single text on a screen (or, in light of the multimedia capacities of current technology, to view a single image or listen to a single sound recording) in order to assess its individual qualities. Just as easily , he or she could elect to view several texts simultaneously, or to explore their ideological and contextual relations to other works, or to automatically scan and sort pertinent critical and background material. Poems, thereby, may be concretely -- almost physically -- placed in relation to the biographies of their authors, the socio-cultural histories of the moments that produced them, the works which influenced them and on which they exerted influence, related concepts, contemporary and modern responses, and parallels in other branches of the arts.
At the same time, hypertext systems could ensure that individual works would not be swallowed up in context, but could stand alone as unique compositions worthy of specialized attention. The intricate intellectual dynamics of the Romantic period could be graphically recreated for the consideration of modern students, and Romanticism could finally be studied on its own aesthetic and ideological terms. The displacement of print in favor of hypertext lexias as a scholarly convention may well enable us to approach a sort of Negative Capability in our treatment of the Romantic movement. We will no longer be subject to the "irritable reaching after fact and reason" that comes with limiting, linear print, and may instead move beyond our own compromised perspectives into an easy empathy with our subject.
The shift into hypertext which promises to bring about this sea-change is not without its own dangers. The rather democratic quality of the medium (which makes it so ideally suited to the revitaliztion of the Romantic movement) may well tend to make the artistic playing field seem to be more level than it actually was. By lessening the emphasis which critics have recently placed on certain works and authors, and by restoring out-of-vogue writers to their proper places in the movement, hypertext will certainly offer us a more approximate understanding of Romanticism. However, we must acknowledge a certain risk of over-equalizing the many poetic voices which interacted in the nineteenth century -- a risk of levelling the cultural conversation in an effort to leaven it.
A second potential danger in re-envisioning the Romantic movement within the virtual world of electronic media lies in the fragmentary nature of hypertext lexias. To users unadept at negotiating and contributing to the web of interconnected information which makes up a hypertext system, it may seem as if individual blocks of text have been abandoned by their authors, left isolated and incomplete. Hypertext lexias may, at first glance, seem to be nothing more than the fragments we have shored against our ruins.
The peculiarly Romantic concept of the fragment as a poetic form is, in fact, quite applicable to a consideration of the new medium of hypertext. Like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" or Wordsworth's "Nutting," the individual bits of linked information of which hypertext systems are formed are at once fragmentary and complete in themselves. Constituting both a marginally finished product and a dynamic process, fragments exist as a "rejection of a mean, mechanical success -- the sort produced, for example, by [what Keats termed] 'consequitive reasoning' " (Levinson, 210). The mean, mechanical, and rigidly linear products of the printed word must be replaced by the poetically-organized lexias of hypertext. Such fragments stand alone, but they also encourage movement outward to the larger world of ideas, inward to a realm of critical introspection, and onward to other texts.
We, as students of Romanticism, must be unafraid of the changes which hypertext and hypermedia technology may effect in our field. Careful planning, thought, effort, and cooperation among contributors to this growing body of scholarship will undoubtedly ensure its success. We must charge ourselves with the carrying of literary studies into the twenty-first century. The shift from print to electronic texts can be infinitely beneficial to those of us who wish for a clearer vista -- a closer prospect from which to view the artistic interaction of the Romantic period.
Abrams, M. H. The Spirit of the Age. in Romanticism: Points of View. Gleckner, R. and Enscoe, G. eds. (1979) Wayne State University Press: Detroit.
Foucault, M. (1976) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Smith, A. M. S., trans. Harper and Row: New York.
Landow, G. P. (1992) Hypertext: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Landow, G. P. (1994) "What's a Critic to Do? Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext." In G. P. Landow (Ed.) Hyper / Text / Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levinson, M. (1986) The Romantic Fragment Poem. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
McGann, J. J. (1983) The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
McGann, J. J. (1993) The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Robinson. P. M. W. (1993) Redefining Critical Editions. in The Digital Word: Text- Based Computing in the Humanities. Landow, G. and Delany, P. eds. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.