British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia

Abstract

BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES: WRITING IN AN AGE OF EUROPHOBIA. By Peter Mortensen. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. Pp. vii + 230. ISBN 1-4039-1515-6. £52.00. Reconfiguring the established boundaries of Romanticism, Peter Mortensen's British Romanticism and Continental Influences questions the insularity of Harold Bloom's concept of authorial anxiety and Stuart Curran's sense of British Romantic discourse as 'counter-genre'. British Romanticism's literary genres, Mortensen contends, engage in numerous cultural transactions with pre-Romantic and European Romantic literature. British Romantic responses to European influence were profoundly complex, as British Romantic authors 'continued to borrow [...] paraphernalia from those un-British writers whom they most vigorously disowned'. Central to Mortensen's revisionist account of first-generation Romantic writers, then, is the conviction that Europhobia is essential to 'understanding Romanticism as a literary and ideological phenomenon'. Tracing anti-European sentiment from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution through to the Anti-Jacobin Review, chapter 1 concentrates on essayists and their 'rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia'. Initially, Burke's 'anti-Gallic demonology' of the French and their sympathisers fuelled an 'ingrained hostility to foreigners and foreign cultures' that 'reveals a deep-seated fear of racial, cultural and political miscegenation'. Following Burke, 'British nationalist writing during the French wars' adopted a pathological language in which 'all outsiders' were demonised and some demonic 'other' had infiltrated 'British national [self-] identity'. Such paranoia was evident in the 'Illuminati Controversy' of the late 1790s, which turned public attention away from the established threat of 'French republicanism' to the 'pan-European enemy' of Germanic Illuminism. Increasingly, these national threats were construed, Mortensen argues, in literary terms. In T. J. Mathias's The Pursuit of Literature, for instance, 'romances, especially non-English ones, are for the first time closely linked to the threat of revolution spreading across the channel from mainland Europe'. As translations of European literature enjoyed widespread popularity, these anti-European tendencies became more anti-Germanic in their pronouncements with the appearance of William Preston's 'Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers'. In spite of this moral distrust of Germanic literary productions, G. A. Burger's ballad 'Lenore', along with other supernatural tales, was influential on British Romantic writers of ballad-poetry. In chapter 2, these influences are detected in Stanley's adapted translation, Lenora, a Tale, which reconciles the content of the original tale to a Christian worldview. Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere' models itself, according to Mortensen, on Burger's fantastical ballads to create a nightmarish universe of 'multiple conflicting interpretations'. …