Rethinking the Romantic Era

Reviews / Votes

Although recognized as a major component of Romantic literature, story-telling has eluded the critical effort to identify the attributes that render it part of the crucial creative endeavor of the times. Kathryn S. Freeman identifies three traits in her subtitle: subjectivity, androgyny, and the recreative. She demonstrates their relevance by tracing the pervasive strategies of metanarrative, metatextuality, and metasexuality in the narratives of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley. Freeman is concerned with story-telling, similar to the author-character irony in Lord Byron's Childe Harold or Don Juan, in which the story-teller is a character in the story that he or she is telling, This "he or she" is further relevant to the metasexuality, for authors readily adopt an adapt alternate genders. Freeman reveals as well the tensions between the factual and fictional author, heightened by the metatextual intrusions of prefaces, footnotes, and cross-references. As dissimilar as these three authors might seem, all three implicate allusions and illusions on multiple levels of narrative. Freeman has effectively recontextualized the Romantic obsession with the creative imagination and subjective identity. Her attentive scrutiny of story-telling provides a valuable guide to Romantic narratology at large, applicable to every other story-teller of the period. -- Frederick Burwick, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles, USA For those of us who teach and interpret Coleridge's poetry and works by women writers, Rethinking the Romantic Era is an engaging and valuable study. * The Coleridge Bulletin *