READING PUBLIC ROMANTICISM

Reading Public Romanticism is a significant new example of the linking of esthetics and historical criticism. Here Paul Magnuson locates Romantic poetry within a public discourse that combines politics and esthetics, nationalism and domesticity, sexuality and morality, law and legitimacy. Building on his well-regarded previous work, Magnuson practices a methodology of close historical reading by identifying precise versions of poems, reading their rhetoric of allusion and quotation in the contexts of their original publication, and describing their public genres, such as the letter. He studies the authors public signature or motto, the forms and significance of address used in poems, and the resonances of poetic language and tropes in the public debates.According to Magnuson, reading locations means reading the writing that surrounds a poem, the paratext or frame of the esthetic boundary. In their particular locations in the public discourse, romantic poems are illocutionary speech acts that take a stand on public issues and legitimate their authors both as public characters and as writers. He traces the public significance of canonical poems commonly considered as lyrics with little explicit social or political commentary, including Wordsworths Immortality Ode; Coleridges This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Ancient Mariner; and Keatss On a Grecian Urn. He also positions Byrons Dedication to Don Juan in the debates over Southeys laureateship and claims for poetic authority and legitimacy. Reading Public Romanticism is a thoughtful and revealing work.Originally published in 1998.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton