Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a genuinely exasperating book. The topic, Romantic medievalism, is of great interest to anyone interested in the rapidly changing historical imagination in the early nineteenth century. Fay's project at first promises unique insights into Romantic medievalism by shifting our attention away from both the novel and Romantic conservatism (commonly joined together in the figure of Sir Walter Scott) to poetry and medievalism's more skeptical and/or radical modes. To do so, she makes a distinction between the troubadour position, which is ironic, skeptical, lyric, and only problematically masculine ("effeminated," as she puts it), and the knightly position, which is "noble" and "manly." From this distinction, she constructs a number of subtly delineated readings of authors ranging from members of the Romantic "big five" to less canonical figures like Seward and LEL.
Now, this is all very well, were it not for one bizarre problem that completely vitiates the argument: Fay supplies virtually no evidence to support it. We are over forty pages into the book before we get extended quotations from _any_ literary text. Throughout, Fay cheerfully makes complex assertions about the writings of a poet like Seward without ever bothering to cite a single line in support of said assertions--or even a single poem, in some cases. Worse still, when Fay does occasionally remember to provide a close reading, it is often difficult to see _how_ the conclusions actually relate to the original poem. Her account of medieval troubadour poetry appears to be based entirely on second-hand reading; moreover, given the lack of textual support, it is unclear if Fay's reading (or, at least, her derived reading) of the troubadour/knight position can actually be reconciled with what the Romantics thought about it. The reader can therefore neither follow Fay's thought processes nor confirm the analysis for herself. This goes for even the most advanced reader, since it is not always clear to what poem(s) Fay is referring. Where on earth was Fay's editor? The result is a book that will be useless to all but the most advanced graduate students and faculty, and then only specialists in the field.

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The Romantic period was characterized by a new historical self-consciousness in which history, and in particular the medieval, became an important screen for comprehending the present. Recent Scholarship has proposed contending theories for understanding how the historical is used to symbolize the political in the period. Romantic Medievalism takes an original position in proposing a critical difference in how the medieval was used to interpret the present, arguing that, where as the conservative writers identified with the knight of romance, radical writers identified with the troubadour of the courtly love lyric.

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