Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable

Résumé 0

Taking the format of a closing roundtable discussion—with prepared statements followed by a formal response (Laurent Folliot) and an open-ended debate between the five contributors—this coda explores the issue of literary periodisation in Romanticism, starting from the Romantics’ own efforts at self-periodisation and the emergence of a new critical discourse on the ‘spirit of the age’ (David Duff, ‘Phases of British Romanticism’). It examines the terminology of periodisation, charting the history and shifting meaning of key terms, and the new awareness of historical beginnings and endings prompted by the French Revolution and other world-changing events (Nicholas Halmi, ‘Periodisation and the Epochal Event’). The difficulties of periodising a movement so diffuse in its origins and so differentiated in its national and regional manifestations are addressed, as is the impulse to find unifying characteristics amid the unprecedented cultural diversity of the period (Fiona Stafford, ‘Romanticism and the “Four Nations”: Not Quite in Time’). While the stress is on British Romanticism through its different historical phases and national traditions, the next contribution takes up a more cross-border approach by examining the relationship between British, European, and American Romanticism (Martin Procházka, ‘Periodisation as a Problem: The Case of American Romanticism’). In each case, questions of chronology are set alongside other theoretical and methodological problems, the aim being to arrive at tentative conclusions about the usefulness or otherwise of a concept of the ‘Romantic period’ or of potential subdivisions of it that could reflect the continuities and discontinuities of Romantic literature.