Modernity's Mist British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation [Hardcover]

Modernitys 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 anteriorityof 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.

In Modernity's Mist Emily Rohrbach has written a counter-history to Nietzsches account of modernity as the story of the present indebting itself to the future by making a promise to it. She has given us a non-apocalyptic framework for understanding Romanticisms secular engagement with a future whose inscrutability makes it neither necessarily redemptive nor destructive. Remarkable here is not just the elegance with which Rohrbach renders the readerly experience of being beset by the shadows of things that elude direct experience or narrative totalization, but the absence of bitterness with which she handles a subject that might well occasion it, given the disproportion between the plenty of multiple if unrealized, competing possibilities and the relative little of actual historical outcomes.Lucil#%