evotes due attention to the literary properties of texts. The essay is also a modest but intriguing exercise in comparative history. Pairing two British authors ( Wordsworth and Coleridge) with three German authors (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Wackenroder), it demonstrates that, for all the cultural differences between them, they represent variations on the same "emergence."
In a field notorious for its murky boundaries and slippery definitions, the author's central argument is refreshingly precise. The "original" Romanticism emerged in England and Germany in the mid-to-late 1790s, and within a decade it had spent itself. If we are to understand both the extraordinary creativity of this initial "burst" and its equally remarkable brevity, we have to come to terms with the early Romanticists' embrace of pantheism (or panentheism). It is in this sense -- as an episode in the long history of pantheism -- that early Romanticism, at its core, reformulated a religious vision. And it is from the implications of a pantheistic vision that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their German counterparts recoiled in the opening years of the nineteenth century.
Riasanovsky, it should be stressed, is not arguing that pantheism was one of several vital ingredient of Romanticism, as several other scholars have done. His contention -- the one on which the essay's claim to originality stands or falls -- is that pantheism was the heart of the beast. The focus on pantheism also distinguishes his approach from efforts to define the essence of Romanticism in psychological terms, as the expression of a psychic structure, or an archetypal myth, or an unconscious urge. Eschewing the ahistorical reductionism of such approaches, Riasanovsky treats pantheism as a specific set of ideas with a historical lineage within the Christian tradition.
The essay is fairly brief, as it should be. It was conceived as an interpretive essay and not as a thoroughgoing treatment of Romanticism or even of early Romanticism. It is appropriate to the genre, I think, that the author raises several large issues but considers them outside his agenda. He limits his task to identifying what emerged and leaves it to others to explain -- in cultural terms, and perhaps even in social terms -- why it emerged where and when it did. Likewise he does not trace the lineages of Romantic pantheism within the larger pantheistic tradition, though on that score the essay raises a number of interesting questions about eighteenth-century anticipations of Romanticism in British and German Protestantism (and is a welcomed complement to M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism).
The author does suggest, however, that his interpretation may help us understand some of the more puzzling features of Romanticism. If the initial "burst" began with a surge of creativity, it ended with a failure of nerve. In the early Romanticists' pantheistic vision -- and here I am summarizing a very subtle argument -- the ego either became the One (by appropriating the "external" world as an extension of its creative subjectivity) or was absorbed into the One. In either case, the individual consciousness -- even as it was enthralled by its capacity to transcend finitude -- confronted the prospect of its annihilation. It was because they were recoiling from that prospect, Riasanovsky suggests, that the early Romanticists could not sustain their initial burst of creativity. For the same reason they tended to find refuge in various forms of political conservatism and religious orthodoxy, despite their initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution. As for the bewildering
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