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

"Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity's Mist describes a poetics of future anteriority or the uncertainty of "what will have been"--A grammar of historical engagement for a time of unprecedented political change"-- Provided by publisher "Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas scholarship has often focused on Romanticism's relations to the past, emphasizing ruins, memory, and mourning, Modernity's Mist situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--a time when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. At the very moment that the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the sense of speed and unpredictability rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity's Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority or the uncertainty of "what will have been": a poetics of anticipation for an age that was--politically, socially, and aesthetically--on the move. While literary historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity's Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. And it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetics of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity"-- Provided by publisher 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.