Extending the reach of Romanticism in the “Keats and Shelley on the Move” Romantic Bicentennial Curran Symposium

by Johannah King-Slutzky, Columbia University

The Keats-Shelley Romantic Bicentennials Curran Symposium met on October 28 at the Grolier Club to commemorate the bicentennials of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s deaths. Sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the theme was “Keats and Shelley on the Move,” an occasion to trace how the Romantics have “moved upward and outward” since the two poets’ deaths in 1821 and 22.

The title is an allusion to Ann Rigney’s 2012 monograph The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. In it, Rigney argues that Scott’s work helped cement British national identity by treating his novels as “fabricated memories” of a shared past.1 The allusion to Rigney draws attention to one of the symposium’s implicit political aims: to question not only what Romanticism is, but which new communities 21st century Romanticists will call into being by reorganizing the literary field into a reconceived shared past.

The symposium’s panels distinguished between three loci of Romanticism’s “movement”: a first panel which charted Shelley’s “contemporary ‘future,’” a second panel on the British Romantics in different national and ethnic contexts, and a third and fourth on remediation and material collection practices – each panel roughly corresponding to movements in time, place and form. This puts the symposium title, “Keats and Shelley on the Move,” in the intriguing position of soliciting conversation on Romantic textual tropes (e.g. remediation, hybridization, or restlessness) that are also instructions for the discipline, and whose more cautious institutions we can watch being marshaled into compliance in real time through symposia like these.

Yet the symposium was also aptly elegiac beneath the emphasis on change. In The Afterlives of Walter Scott, the book that inspired the symposium title “Keats and Shelley on the Move,” Rigney writes that Scott’s Waverley novels were “a huge investment in making [the] past irrelevant as an active force in the present.”2 Perhaps for this reason, it was at first difficult not to read presenters’ buoyant characterizations of the field’s vitality as preempting an unspoken experience of mourning. Victims of Romanticism’s success, our literary past may now be “irrelevant as an active force” in the modern world, whose sense of the past as transient we helped create.

Only once did this thought consciously irrupt into our discussion, when presenter Omar Miranda noted “it’s not going well for us out there” during one of the Q&As. But some speakers, particularly those on the remediation panel, were outwardly prescriptive in a way that underscored the symposium’s proleptic aims. In Lissette Szwydky’s words, “If you want something to stay in circulation, adapt it.” 

The morning began with Iris Cushing on di Prima and Shelley’s “lyrical alchemy.” Eric Lindstrom then discussed how the New York School appropriated Shelley’s elegiac and locodescriptive modes to enlarge the poet’s latent homoeroticism into a more expansive queerness. Focusing on Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Lindstrom unearthed how Schuyler transformed lines from “Adonais” – the “light spear topped with a cypress cone… dripping with the forest's noonday dew” – into the orgasmic genitals in “Buried at Springs,” in which an old spruce tree is “hung with unripe cones / each exuding at its tip / gum, pungent, clear as a tear.” Finally, in a discussion of “Mont Blanc,” Judith Goldman offered theoretical and historical context to her own creative practice by exploring the relationship between petroglyphs, glacial scarring, and the palimpsestic construction of “Mont Blanc.” She asked us to consider how poetry behaves like rock and rock like poetry to produce what she calls “geosocial poetry,” which calls attention to geological forces that are unstable, pre-political, and impactful yet impossible to master. “Geosocial” poetry was new to me, but Goldman’s “geosocial” poetics clearly belongs to an evolving clade of ecocriticism on rock-poetry hybrids that includes the work of Noah Heringman, Tobias Meneley’s “geohistorical poetics” and an entire 2020 anthology on “geopoetics” and the “geolyric.” While I suspect Goldman’s presentation was assigned to this panel because she herself is one of the “contemporary futures” of Romantic poetry, I was struck by how her work also adds nuance to the notion of a “contemporary future”: first by mixing human and geologic timescales and, second, by questioning the notion of futurity at all when being and nonbeing are inextricable. In her phrasing, “our most current petroglyphs are also epitaphs for ice.”

The second panel of the day returned to the 19th century with three talks on Romanticism’s movement in space rather than time. It began with Omar Miranda’s presentation on the Cuban poet José María Heredia y Heredia. Miranda compared the Cuban’s 1820 poem, “En el Teocalli de Cholula,” to British Romantic touchstones including “Queen Mab,” “Mont Blanc,” and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.” “En el Teocalli de Cholula,” which uses Cholula, an Aztec pyramid, and Popocatépetl, an active volcano, to figure cyclical patterns of violence, thematically resembles “Mont Blanc,” but there is no evidence Heredia had read Shelley when he composed it. Rather, Heredia draws on Romantic traditions he shares with Shelley – locodescriptive poetry, archeological and geological sublimes, neoclassicism (both Greek and Aztec), etc. – but revises them to make readers more sensitive to colonial experiences of subjection. What Miranda called the “sobering reality of sacrificial violence” is congealed in the Aztec pyramid, yet European colonial violence, Heredia’s actual social context, haunts the text and implies a bloody universal history whose perpetual stream rolls through all empires.

The panel’s second speaker, Matt Sandler, spoke on Black Romanticism and abolition, also the topic of his monograph, The Black Romantic Revolution. Sandler is one of the eight founding members of the Bigger 6 Collective, and like his co-founders, is interested in “finding Romanticism where it’s not supposed to be.” For the Bigger 6 group this often refers to studying the footprint of Romanticism in former British colonies rather than the metropole. Much of Sandler’s talk performed the important work of drawing formal and thematic connections between Keats’s poetry and that of later Black poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and his memorialist, Anne Spencer, who ventriloquized Dunbar in verse with “Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— / Ah, how poets sing and die!” But Sandler also suggested 20th century Black Romantics may help us think through contemporary theoretical debates, such as the tension he proposed between Orlando Patterson’s theory of slavery as unrecoverable “social death” and Robin Kelley’s proposition in Freedom Dreams that historians can recover utopian promise from past failed social movements. Abolition lurks somewhere “within that opposition,” according to Sandler.

The final presentation of the panel was Tomoko Nakagawa’s "The Creature Stands at a Crossroads: the 1889-90 Japanese Translation of Frankenstein.” Nakagawa discussed a Meiji period serial adaptation of Frankenstein and its accompanying illustrations based on Japanese woodblock prints. She also delved into the illuminating effect of translation: in Shelley’s manuscripts, Victor avoids abusive language in his first letters, referring to his creation first as a “being.” In the Japanese translation, the creature usually goes by “monster,” which Nakagawa believes perceptively surfaces his indefinability, which otherwise takes shape in English chiefly through the proliferation of names assigned to him.

The third and fourth panels were both dedicated to changes to Romantic texts' forms. The third panel, “Romantic Remediations: New Books,” featured Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Mike Goode, and Judith Pascoe, who shared brief recaps of their books followed by discussion between the panelists and questions from the audience. Szwydky’s book, Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, compares remediation practices then and now to emphasize how adaptation is not derivative, but primary. She credits adaptation with “bringing storytelling to life” and calls it “the main mechanism of canonization.” Rather than discuss a singular author’s intellectual property, we should think of “culture texts,” an inclusive reframe that weighs the contributions of a franchise or storyline’s first published author and subsequent adapters with equal gravity. 

Mike Goode’s book, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen and the New Messages of Old Media, explores how texts behave when they encounter new mediums. Goode updates Marshall MacLuhan’s infamous adage, “the medium is the message,” by proposing that texts encode messages about their own mediacy which define their afterlives in subsequent transmedia adaptations. William Blake, for example, who often wrote in proverbs, is easily translated into short viral quotes in the 21st century. And Walter Scott’s novels were often reproduced in stereoscope rather than other immersive visual forms like panorama. Goode links this curiosity to Scott’s letters on demonology and his interest in how eyes are tricked into seeing ghosts, which he says mirror how stereoscopy tricks the mind into perceiving flat drawings as three dimensional.

Finally, Judith Pascoe returned the audience to Japan to discuss the – apparently – huge cultural footprint of Wuthering Heights, which she recounts in On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan. Pascoe made a number of insightful connections between her work on Brontë and Tomoko Nakagawa’s on Frankenstein. Both novels were popularized in Japan after educational reformers added them to girls schools’ curricula. But Pascoe’s most compelling observations were on the value of remediation in general. She suggested that Japanese readers and audiences of the Wuthering Heights cultural text have an advantage over anglophone readers because anglophone audiences experience Brontë’s work in (or as) its “original” form. Japanese audiences have always encountered Wuthering Heights via translations and adaptations, whose multiplicity helps them understand the “richness and potentiality of a writer’s work.” Here Pascoe gestured toward Manu Chander’s Brown Romantics. Like Chander, she says, she treats originality as a limitation. 

I was particularly intrigued by the remediation panelists’ shared, pre-agreed prompts, including one about the part of their research they found most surprising. The emphasis on process is, of course, a well-defined feature of Romanticism. But I found the attention to “surprise” an especially well-suited topic for a Keats-Shelley panel on remediation precisely because adaptation is so often likened to deviant reproduction. This is classic Keats: for the Cockney Romantic, variation is repetition’s inevitable outgrowth, spilling out from nature’s otherwise faithful seasonal reproductions. In this regard, adaptation is like a familiar melody that nevertheless startles and delights, to borrow from Keats’s 1817 “Life of Sensation” letter on prototypes. What if textual adaptation is Keats’s “fine excess” that “appear[s] almost a remembrance”? That is, paradoxically, the foundation of the capacity to surprise.

The last panel, “Visible in the Shape of a Book,” showcased Romantic-era and Romantic-inspired artifacts from Grolier Club members and friends. The panel included William Buice III, Jack Lynch, Mark Samuels Lasner, Barbara Henry, David Solo, and Catherine Payling. Besides traditional “texts” like lost manuscript pages and early book editions, the objects on display included photographs, a Romantic-era counterfeit Shakespearean snuffbox, a William Morris-printed invitation to an American Keats bust unveiling, and a collection of “linocut” linoleum block prints inspired by Blake.

Both the third and fourth panels’ anti-originalist critique rhymes with the recent charge Manu Chander, Nikki Hessel, and other transnational Romanticists have leveled against Romantic literature and literary study’s eurocentrism. The expectation, they say, is that Brown and Indigenous writers who take up Romantic texts/tropes are derivative. Yet such dismissals on the basis that adaptations should faithfully reproduce originals obscure how such works are “no less authentic than their canonical counterparts” but simply “less ‘English’.”3  

Over the course of the day, aversion to originalism emerged as a shared ethics that linked speakers from both transmedial and transnational subfields. Preference for forgery and (transformative) reproduction spanned Lissette Szwydsky, Mike Goode, and Judith Pascoe’s talks on remediation, Tomoko Nakagawa’s paper on Japanese translations of Frankenstein, and Jack Lynch’s explanation for why he collects 19th century counterfeits of Shakespearean artifacts.

But we may speak of “unoriginal” in two senses – meaning both “derivative” and “allochthonous,” foreign to Romanticism’s conventionally understood birthplace and time. Anti-originalism therefore also characterizes the first two panels, which locate Romanticism in non-original nations and historical periods. 

What to make of these half-suspicious, half-celebrated cultural distensions? Ian Duncan describes the cultural memory work of gothic and Romantic literature as an “extension of suffrage” that brought new populations into a shared past.4 But Ann Rigney, who cites Duncan in her discussion of Romantics on the move, also refers to Romanticism’s afterlife as producing “prosthetic memory,” a term she borrows from Alison Landsberg’s 2004 book of the same name.5 Prosthetic memories are “stories that lack a basis in prior shared identities and for that very reason become crucial to…modern forms of [community] building.”6 Rigney’s seamless mixture of suffrage and prosthesis metaphors belies a deeper contradiction I’d argue dogs the Romantic anti-originalism concept, including as it appeared at this year’s Curran Symposium. To extend suffrage is to preserve what already exists while absorbing new actors, particularly those who were previously excluded from civic representation. But a prosthetic memory – which Rigney says defines Romantic memory – rejects the possibility of the past’s one-time integrity, since in her formulation all C19+ memory is prosthetic rather than organic.

Here I’d like to propose a distinction between two strands of thought at the symposium. I am calling them “Romanticisms” and “Romanticism on the move” based on A.O. Lovejoy’s seminal 1924 article and this year’s symposium title. For Lovejoy, “Romanticisms” produce new “thought-complexes” and must be distinguished because their values are at odds.7 I would suggest that some of the processes under discussion at the symposium, such as transmedial adaptation, conscious authorial intervention, and misprision, are all types of hybridization likely to produce new thought complexes and values systems, although their manifest qualities, like character or setting, may be the same. As a number of conference speakers remarked, adaptation and translation theories are premised on the notion that adaptation produces new texts rather than merely reproducing an original with flaws. Such new texts surely profess commensurately altered values. Attending to the hybrid text’s new values is in line with Hortense Spillers’s suggestion to read literary history for “a matrix of literary discontinuities.”8

But “Romanticism on the move”  – Sandler’s phrase was “finding Romanticism where it is not supposed to be” –  preserves core principles while relocating them to novel places, times and populations. Although most of the first and second panels fall under this umbrella, the “on the move” group is easiest to spot in discourse on the Black Romantic revolutionaries Matt Sandler spoke and writes about. They reflect C.L.R. James’s conviction that Black people in the Americas inherited and more faithfully enacted Romantic principles than Romantic Europeans. A stirring passage from James summarizes this credo: 

The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.9

The “Romanticism on the move” school of thought says readers develop more acute powers of sight through distance. But this distance isn’t merely geographic. For example, Tomoko Nakakawa, speaking about an illustrated (in other words, a transmedial) version of Frankenstein, discussed how woodblock prints help readers perceive Mary Shelley’s interest in East/West collision. Likewise, on the remediation panel, Mike Goode noted that Jane Austen fan fic writers often “get” Austen more faithfully than any other readers. This finding undergirds centuries of literary tropes: from the 20th century’s “defamiliarization” to the long 19th century lyric’s “I-thou” formulation to early modern drama’s emotionally clarifying soliloquies that treat the self as a “second text,” estranging techniques often illuminate a textual, cultural, or characterological “essence.”

I don’t want to suggest that the distinction I’m observing is cut and dried. There is no sharp division between a “Romanticisms” model that affirms actively developing plural values systems and the “Romanticism on the move” paradigm that extends relatively consistent shared values to new contexts. The “Romanticisms” and “Romanticism on the move” models complement and inform each other. 

Among the speakers, Matt Sandler was the most straightforward representative of “Romanticism on the move” as I’ve defined it. (It also helps that I have his 2020 monograph before me.) Yet he, too, argues that transplanting Romanticism into an African American context necessarily requires substantive values change, sounding a “Romanticisms” (plural) note. Here is one example from his book, The Black Romantic Revolution: “Romanticism was a European-originating, cosmopolitan ideology, which sometimes emphasized the local, Indigenous, and rooted, so diasporic Black artists and intellectuals had to make significant revisions to its basic components.”11 The seeming “extension of suffrage” to add Black Americans to a shared Romantic tradition, in other words, requires modifying “basic components.”

But so too, do Black Romantics demonstrate more faithful enactments of consistent Romantic values, although propertied white Romantics had hypocritically betrayed those principles when they diverged from their self-interest. Thus, in Black Romanticism, “the fugitive return[s] again and again up to the present to remind Americans of the distance between their stated ideals and lived experience.”12 This anti-hypocrisy truth-finding mission is what Sandler, quoting Hawthorne on romance, calls “enrich[ing] the shadows” to make a political-aesthetic intervention. 

To summarize, contemporary attempts to chart Romanticism’s departures from its “original” form – the mission of this year’s Curran Symposium – include two entangled but distinct tendencies. I have named one of these tendencies “Romanticisms” to identify the multiplicity of values that fall under this umbrella, in which Romanticism is hybrid and always evolving. And I have named the second tendency “Romanticism on the move” to indicate scholarly interventions in which nonwhite and colonized peoples are said to render a consistent, transnational set of Romantic values more faithfully than their white British counterparts.

While these schools of thought differ more in emphasis than substance, I wager that how self-consciously we engage in one or the other project is a political question. Yet self-consciousness in this moment is nearly impossible. The historian Peter Fritzsche says Romanticism is defined by the phrase “alles wird so ganz anders,” or “everything is becoming so different,” which he found repeated among 19th century witnesses of the French Revolution.13 Fritzsche’s translation is illuminating, since the phrase also translates to “everything will be so different.” His choice to use the present progressive (“is becoming”) in English suggests that in becoming conscious of one’s evolution one can only notice what’s indefinite. This “consciousness” is absorbing and muddy rather than clear sighted and prophetic. I would suggest that this muddiness makes identifying our ethics during periods of change more difficult and may be one reason I detect notes of uncertainty about whether or not our field’s “expanded suffrage” is globalizing or instead affirms discontinuity and irreducible difference.

Romanticism now is ensnared in its own crisis. Literary scholarship’s enfeeblement isn’t a revolutionary bang, but the slow violence Carolyn Lesjak compares to enclosure, though in this case, “enclosure” means the dismantling of public education and the neoliberalization of the university rather than restricting land rights.16 Charting our field’s process of “becoming,” professional events like “Keats and Shelley on the Move” are necessarily incapable of full self consciousness. We are still living in solution, too busy watching – not necessarily with sadness – how everything is becoming so different.

Notes

1. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott : Memory on the Move, (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 4.

2. Ibid.

3. Manu Chander, Brown Romantics, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2017), 92.

4. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens, (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), 178.

5. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Mass Culture, (New York: Columbia UP, 2004).

6. Diedre Lynch, “The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move,” Modern Language Quarterly 75 no. 3: 446-49. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2690118.

7. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39 no. 2: 220-254. https://doi.org/10.2307/457184.

8. Hortense Spillers, “Afterword: Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 251.

9. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (New York: Random House, 1989), 198.

10. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” Poetry Foundation. Accessed December 1, 2022. 

11. Matt Sandler, The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery, (New York: Verso, 2020), 7.

12. Ibid, 19.

13. Peter Fritzsche, “The Melancholy of History: Disenchantment and the Possibility of Narrative after the French Revolution,” in  Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage  and the Nation, ed.  Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen (Boston: Brill, 2010), 6.

14. Ibid, 8.

15. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 no. 2: 197-222, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/596640, 204. 

16. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure, (Stanford, Stanford UP, 2021).

This article is contributed by Johannah King-Slutzky, a PhD candidate at Columbia University.