The Historicity of Romantic Discourse

This provocative critique of Romantic discourse will profoundly affect how readers perceive not only the writers of the Romantic period, but also their most celebrated modern critics--such as de Man, Hartman, and McGann--who, as Professor Siskin points out, are themselves unwitting captives of the ideas and writing they criticize. With the Romantic redefinition of the self as a mind that grows, writing became an expressive index to that growth--the product, as we still understand it, of a developing creative imagination. Siskin argues that this imaginative mind is not a timeless producer, but a culture-specific product, not knowledge discovered in the course of mankind's inevitable progress, as Wordsworth and Keats claimed, but knowledge made at a particular point in time. As he traces the transformation of historical concepts of self and behavior into "natural truths," Siskin performs the political task of relating the production and reproduction of the Romantic knowledge to the workings of social, professional, and economic power. His interdisciplinary rewriting of the relationship of the past to the present will appeal to a broad range of scholars, including Romanticists, 18th-century specialists, literary historians and theorists, and educated readers interested in the origins of our culture's current obsessions with addiction, sexual difference, and the accumulation of property. Above all, it will have a lasting effect on students of Romanticism, who will never read the Romantics in quite the same way again.