About Us

Academic Editors

Thank you to our academic editors, Duncan Wu, Jane Moore and John Strachan, for all of their support and guidance in creating Routledge Historical Resources: Romanticism.

Publisher

Rachel Douglas (Editor, Routledge Historical Resources)

Clair Gordon (Senior Development Editor)

Alyson Claffey (Development Editor)

Images

The images in the gallery were kindly donated from the personal collections of Paul Betz (Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University, Washington, DC) and Duncan Wu (Raymond A. Wagner Professor of Literary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, DC).

Other images on the site are from Alamy, Inc.; Unsplash; and the Open Access program of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

A short commentary from Duncan Wu on Romanticism in the 21st Century  

If the statistics are to be believed, this is an anxious time for those of us dedicated to the teaching of literature. The MLA Newsletter for summer 2021 tells us the number of degrees awarded in English Language and Literature “in 2019 fell below 40,000 for the first time in three decades”. In the Guardian, Anna Fazackerly reported that    

By the January application deadline this year, 7,045 18-year-olds in the UK had applied to study English at university, a fall of more than a third from 10,740 in 2012.

As a subject, English fluctuates in popularity all the time and, as James F. English has pointed out, the worldwide picture over the long term would suggest the subject is in a healthy state globally. 

Against this trend of decline in student numbers in English’s traditional bases in North America and the United Kingdom, which not surprisingly affects the viability of some courses fielded by English departments, it’s worth noting that those focusing on particular historical periods or works continue, for the most part, to attract sizeable numbers of students. Mine on the Romantics, 20th-century British poetry, and 20th-century American poetry recruit well, often running up large waiting lists in the first week of term. 

My interest here, then, is less in English studies as a whole, but in Romantic studies within that larger context. I very much doubt whether we have detailed enough statistics to prove it, but I’d be willing to guess that, in most cases, wherever Romanticism is taught, the numbers taking the relevant course or courses are holding up.    

Over the last thirty years much has been done to popularize the idea of Romanticism as being where the roots of the modern age lie, and the pleasure with which people tend to read, inter alia, Frankenstein and “The Ancient Mariner”, and to engage with the lives of the Romantics—particularly such figures as Byron and Mary Shelley—has made the period easier to present as rewarding of close examination. The raffishness of their lives, re-enacted often on stage, television and film, can only enhance their appeal. Are they like us? They are and they aren’t. Certainly they seem like us in certain respects, and we can emphasize those in order to argue for relevance.  

It helps that the Romantics are still taught in British schools and that the Gothic, broadly defined, is widespread in modern culture. And Romanticism clearly coincides with, and feeds into, the growing interest in the anti-slavery literature and agitation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Romanticism is clearly an adaptable resource: it has an important place in women’s writing, has been at the cutting edge of debates about literature, ecology, and the environment, and has a vital part to play in the history of African-American writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All of which leads me to suggest that the appeal of Romantic literature, and the period generally, is likely to last even as other historical periods—in fact the very concept of so-called “old historicism”—lose adherents. 

I suppose, once upon a time, such flexibility might have seemed “vulgar”, even unacademic—but we live in very different times now when compared with the 1970s and 80s. In this third decade of the twenty-first century, still in the throes of a major pandemic that shows no sign of waning, we have no option but to exploit fully the popular aspects of Romanticism as an aid to our students. I think specialists in all fields need to take the same approach, frankly, but it’s clear that with so many Romantic icons already integrated into popular culture, we have an advantage. 

If, as some argue, this is a crisis moment in English studies, I’d suggest departments on both sides of the Atlantic look to the curriculum and ask which parts continue to enjoy the support of students, with a view to expansion. From that perspective, a department with only one Romanticist might do well to consider enlisting more, while those with none should ask themselves whether their hiring policies are misguided. Almost certainly, would be my thought. 

The point is that Romanticism is part of our subject that ought to be maintained regardless of whether we face a crisis or not. At the same time I’m prone to wonder whether we really are on the edge of an abyss, or whether English studies is simply undergoing one of the occasional fluctuations that has occurred, on and off, over the post-war period, to a subject that, as one writer has it, “enjoys reasonably robust institutional health and fair prospects for the future.” 

 

Bibliography 

MLA Newsletter, 53.2 (Summer 2021) 

Guardian online, 19 June 2021 

James F. English, The Global Future of English Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012