Description
Book SynopsisThrough close engagement with the work of Wordsworth, Austen, and Byron, The History of Missed Opportunities posits that the everyday first emerged as a distinct category of experience, or first became thinkable, in the Romantic period. Conceived here as something overlooked and only noticed in retrospect, the everyday not only becomes subject matter for Romanticism, it also structures Romantic poetry, prose, and writing habits. Because the everyday is not noticed the first time around, it comes to be thought of as a missed opportunity, a possible world that was not experienced or taken advantage of and of whose history—or lack thereof—writers become acutely conscious.
Consciousness of the everyday also entails a new relationship to time, as the Romantics turn to the history of what might have been. In recounting Romanticism's interest in making things recurrently present, in recovering a past of what was close at hand yet underappreciated, William H. Galperin positions the Romantics as precursors to twentieth-century thinkers of the everyday, including Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, and Cavell. He attends to Romantic discourse that works at cross purposes with standard accounts of both Romanticism and Romantic subjectivity. Instead of individualizing or turning inward, the Romantics' own discourse depersonalizes or exhibits a confrontation with thing-ness and the material world.
Trade Review"Saying more than some books twice its size, Galperin's book is an imaginative and savvy piece of scholarship and criticism." -- Orrin Wang * University of Maryland *
"Galperin's reassessments of Wordsworth and Austen make familiar texts new again, and his discussion of Byron is utterly compelling.
The History of Missed Opportunities offers insights aplenty, some truly stunning readings, and a tremendous provocation to the field." -- Deidre Lynch * Harvard University *
"Philosophically adventurous and stylistically exacting, as well as frequently entertaining, Galperin's idiosyncratic rereadings form a genuinely new characterization of British Romanticism." -- Tristram Wolff *
Nineteenth-Century Contexts *
"The critical yield of
The History of Missed Opportunities is the dramatic and rewarding reorientation it presents in historical thinking within the study of Romanticism.... Galperin's study challenges us to reconsider an image of history that would move us through a past, present, and then a future, and it illuminates literature's role in assimilating and reencountering forms of experience that history itself may miss." -- Magdalena Ostas *
Studies in Romanticism *
"[Galperin's] findings help us to see these authors and their characters as complex, self-interrogating, and self-critical figures." -- Richard Eldridge *
Review 19 *
"[T]he book's strength lies . . . in its deft and sensitive readings. . . .a provocative reminder that the passions, idealizations, and subjective consolidations with which we associate Romanticism exist alongside its commitments to the quotidian and the particular." -- Andrea Henderson *
SEL Studies in English Literature *
"
The History of Missed Opportunities, like the best literary criticism, takes readers back to the texts and the very lines that are most familiar and reveals things that have been overlooked all along, potential meanings that were missed. Only, in this case, the missed opportunities are the uncanny subject of the criticism itself . . . .This book will resonate strongly not only within romantic studies but perhaps more so beyond given the cultural moment, which harbors nostalgia as a habitus, and the deft analyses herein . . . . [T]he book marvelously identifies a latent utopian aesthetic that many have felt in reading and teaching, and teaching again, the literature of the past." -- Jonathan Farina *
The Wordsworth Circle *
"
The History of Missed Opportunities is essential. It is a provocative and rewarding book, and its contributions to our understanding of the works it addresses and of Romanticism more broadly are, by turns, compelling and disquieting." -- Andrew Franta *
Modern Philology *
"This book distills much of what is best in Galperin's previous work, taking it into newly ambitious conceptual terrain....[It] conceives of its themes through such a powerful dialectic and provides such original readings of its chosen texts that it clearly exemplifies much that is most compelling about Romantic studies today. It is a must-read book for any scholar in the field." -- David Collings *
Keats-Shelley Journal *
Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrelude: The Panorama and the Everyday chapter abstract
In the large circular paintings that Robert Barker exhibited in his Panorama in Leicester Square, notably his painting of London (1795), viewers encountered a distended present in which the everyday, a stratum of experience that, as Maurice Blanchot notes, is "never see[n] a first time but is only see[n] again," comes eventually to view. The "panoramic" experience registers a period-bound phenomenology in which the everyday becomes visible and thinkable for essentially the first time.
Introduction chapter abstract
The emergence of the everyday in the romantic period involved a mode of recovery that pitted an empirical history—where the past remains a guide to what is probable and likely to reoccur—and a history in which the prior is sufficiently singular that its reproducibility in any form apart from what "every day life" is undermined. This latter history is evident in Wordsworth's demonstration of what subjective or "poetic" experience routinely forgets or misses. It is at work in Austen's revisions that return her to a world appreciable solely in retrospect. In Byron it is allied with the "history" to which marriage and everyday domesticity are consigned before marriage, or by a nostalgia that, lacking mnemonic support, is radically anonymous and conceptual. From domestic fiction to the fragment poem, including Byron's Don Juan, romantic-period literary production is marked by genres answerable to the everyday.
1The Everyday, History, and Possibility chapter abstract
Although the "everyday" has long been synonymous with malaise, anomie, and routine, the conditions surrounding its emergence in the romantic period, where it names a possible world that has been missed or overlooked, are recapitulated and extended in twentieth century thought. In the conceptual moves undertaken by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and by Henri Lefebvre in his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, the everyday is dependent, practically as well as dialectically, on an entrenched orientation typically associated with idealism, or with romanticism in its "standard" formation, that "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger) both predates and supersedes. A similar conception of the everyday obtains in the writings of political theorist Jane Bennett, whose sense of an enchanted materialism echoes both Lefebvre and philosopher Stanley Cavell in stressing the "extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday" and the larger assemblage to which we all belong.
2Wordsworth's Double Take chapter abstract
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth's poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, "things of every day" emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet's sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
3Histories of the Present and the Historicity of the Present: Mansfield Park, Emma, Jane Austen's Letters chapter abstract
In the approximately fifteen years during which her first three novels were revisited and revised, Jane Austen achieved an appreciative perspective on her milieu that would have been impossible had that interval been less protracted and less consequential. By process of revision and reflection, a world and milieu that had been written out of history was provisionally restored in a practice inimitably Austenian. This restoration is especially evident in the two novels composed just after the period of revision—Mansfield Park and Emma—whose worlds remained both an unprecedented representation of "real life" to contemporary readers and a resuscitation of a present lost to time. Similarly, the letters that Austen wrote her sister over the course of her life make clear that the "real natural every day" world that she brought vividly to the published page was the only "prospect" when there was increasingly no future for her.
4Lord and Lady Byron chapter abstract
An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron's short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the "singular," everyday world of relation that marriage represented for him, both beforehand, when marriage was an abstraction performed in correspondence with Milbanke, and afterwards, when the Byron marriage and the world it figured was literally a history of missed opportunities that the poet recaptured and reinscribed in Don Juan. The finite, epistolary conversation that constituted the Byron courtship was more than a trial run at marriage, particularly as the opposite of what Byron disparagingly called "love." It proved a stay against a future that, on the relational front and in Byron's contemporaneous Eastern Tales, was devoid of either hope or possibility. Here, in the sway of anticipatory nostalgia, marriage day after day would be suddenly fathomable and as valuable as the monetary fortune Byron also sought, but as a history of missed opportunities.
5Don Juan and the Romantic Fragment chapter abstract
Along with the repetition of days that it mimes as an endless conversation, Don Juan is additionally representative in the way a missed opportunity (the Byron marriage) is recognized and honored by the poem's form. The ever-unfolding poem amounts to a history that takes the form not of retrospection but of what might have been. Don Juan registers the gain, the "willingness for the everyday," that marriage produces in practice, and in this case poetic practice, and "in the repetition of days" (Cavell) to which his poem conforms. As a relational do-over, whose ending, accordingly, was a parting unto death, the poem connects to fragment poems—a quintessentially romantic genre—by Coleridge and Shelley and to the tendency in Keats's Odes to foreground a present that goes undocumented or is closed off by form.
