On the Numbers of Romanticisms

Jerome McGann, his Romantic Ideology, has recently renewed debate how many romanticisms there are, which is, of course, tantamount to asking how we know what romanticism is. original debate, which central position papers were Arthur 0. Lovejoy's On Discrimination of Romanticisms (first published PMLA 1924) and Rene Wellek's The Concept of Romanticism Literary History (first published Comparative Literature 1949), set to determine whether kinds of generalizations made literary historical field of romanticism had any use at all. Lovejoy, firing opening salvo, asserted that the word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform function of verbal sign.' His anxiety all-inclusiveness of term might, he suggested, merely reflect personal tic of professional specialization: one of philosopher's trade, at least, situation is embarrassing and exasperating; for philosophers, spite of popular belief to contrary, are persons who suffer from morbid solicitude to know precisely what they are talking about (67). Having converted apparent confession into display of professionalism, he went on to argue for importance of discriminating romanticisms, to distinguish between possibly quite distinct thought-complexes (68) various manifestations of romanticism and to identify, as examples of such distinctions, 1) romantic naturalism that conceived natural as a thing you reached by going back and by leaving out (72) and as one that associated with primitivism of some mode or degree (73); 2) romantic aestheticism that saw itself as in its very essence denial of older naturalist presuppositions (73); and 3) romanticism that specifically identified an aesthetic perception of infinitude with Christianity. Wellek's response, some years later, was to shift terms of debate rather fundamentally, from consideration of modes of romanticism to discussion of what people expect when they hear

Genealogy · History · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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