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New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

Online ISBN:
9781531507572
Print ISBN:
9781531505110
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

Christopher Rovee
Christopher Rovee

Robert Penn Warren Professor of English

Louisiana State University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
2 January 2024
Online ISBN:
9781531507572
Print ISBN:
9781531505110
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

New Critical Nostalgia explores literary study’s nostalgic attachments to its past, while asking how romanticism has figured in the stories that literary professionals tell about their field. This book recasts an essential episode in the historiography of English: the powerful rejection of romanticism by American New Critics. Through intensive considerations of some classic works of mid-twentieth century criticism, read in light of the tectonic growth of the modern American university, this book reveals literary study’s profound investment in the romantic lyric. It shows that the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, has informed literary scholars’ investments from the very beginning of the field’s modern era, pushing the discipline forward in the face of its perennially uncertain future. New Critical Nostalgia’s individual chapters engage with a set of major critical figures—John Crowe Ransom, Josephine Miles, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, M. H. Abrams, and W. K. Wimsatt—as they respond to poetry by William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. These engagements with the romantic lyric are traced both in influential published work and in unpublished correspondence, notes, and teaching materials. Mixing historical, biographical, and critical analysis, this book shows how readers of multiple methodological schools, working in radically different academic locales, wrangled over what it means to read—and over how to read romanticism—with nothing less than the future of literary studies at stake.

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