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Repossessing the Romantic Past.

Article Excerpt
Repossessing the Romantic Past edited by Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton. Cambridge U. Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 254. $90.

In the past three decades a new picture of British Romanticism has emerged in opposition to the focus on six male poets in two generations. Along with the expansion of the field to women writers and prose works, there has been a new recognition of the continuities between eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism, as well as an abandonment of oversimplified binaries between rationalism and imagination, Enlightenment and enchantment, the constraints of genre and tradition and the spontaneous overflow of liberated passion. Repossessing the Romantic Past is a major collection of well-researched essays that serve to consolidate this expansion and renewal of the field of Romantic studies. We can locate an emblem of the new conception of Romanticism in Anne Janowitz's chapter on how Lucy Aikin's memoirs serve as part of the family "reputation machine" that established the fame of Aikin's aunt Anna Laetitia Barbauld (80). Like other contributors to this collection, Janowitz focuses on sociability and conversation, especially in a tradition of rational dissent--located here in the circle of the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson: "In Johnson's dining room Fuseli hung his painting The Nightmare, so Johnson's dining club of discursive rationality was overseen by the Romantic passions of that frightening and compelling dreamscape" (87). In this new vision of Romanticism, the imagination and its unconscious sources occupy the same room as the rational conversations of politically engaged writers in a circle that includes those whom Jon Mee terms "disputatious women such as Mary Hays and Mary...

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