Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism

Abstract

tendency to become “the person whose life [he] was reading” after he imitates the Stoic Scaevola’s seeming indifference to physical pain, Risinger’s Byron is a man similarly inhabited by texts—though, crucially, those he has composed himself (124). It proves a clever and powerful response to the outsized figure Byron presents even in literary scholarship and, with Risinger’s profound consideration of the poet’s “linkage of moors, slaves, and Indians under the sign of Stoicism,” a provocative account of the stakes of Stoic philosophy’s racialized aspect before, and in the wake of, Abolition (147). Byron’s Stoic characters thus interrogate social and racial distinctions while simultaneously grappling with modern, cosmopolitan alienation. For bothMathes and Risinger, Romanticism affords a model for staying with the troubling, distracting, and heady affects that resist tidy inclusion in prevailing sociable models. Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion and Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation equally commit to the material force of ideas while fully embracing their shimmering abstract implications, looking to Romantic writers’ desire for the sincere and the true, however indeterminate. Risinger cites a particularly illuminating passage from Keats: “I sometimes feel not the influence of a Passion or Affection during a whole week—and so long [as] this sometimes continues I begin to suspect myself and the genuineness of my feelings at other times” (23). As the literary history of feeling continues to develop, moments like this offer a critical reminder of the tensions, dissonances, and disappointments that invite as they thwart perfect understanding. “The point,” as Mathes declares, “is to give oneself over to the momentum” (185). As vibrant models for sustaining such critical and affective energy, Risinger’s and Mathes’s transformative studies of Romantic feeling promise to provoke further rereadings.