Romanticism's Generative Reading

An exploration of the generative energy of literary texts, from Frankenstein’s origin stories and Jane Austen’s loose ends to the genius of William Empson

In Romanticism’s Generative Reading, Susan Wolfson convenes an innovative array of subjects, texts, and cultural situations: lightning, Frankenstein, textual editing, Shakespeare read by girls, and William Empson’s revelatory influence. Wolfson reads with close attention to the strange densities of literary language and the multiplicities of literary imagination. Great writers are generative writers, she argues, transforming readers through the energies of reading. Exploring texts and contexts, Wolfson traces literary formations and historical dynamics generating and regenerating one another.

Wolfson puts Mary Wollstonecraft into the surprising company of Thomas De Quincey, and casts lightning as the “Spirit of the Age,” forking into promise and peril. She probes the multiple origin stories of Mary Shelley’s durably fascinating genesis novel, Frankenstein, and investigates her editing of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works after his death, an ongoing textual marriage. She renders counterintuitive readings of three novels by Jane Austen, working from the overabundance of problematic plots; and describes two efforts to present Shakespeare for girls—Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (hence “bowdlerize”) and Charles and Mary Lamb’s rather more liberal Tales from Shakespeare (or, as Wolfson puts it, “Lambsplaining”). Finally, Wolfson turns to the influence of the nineteenth century on the twentieth-century critic William Empson and his generative work with texts and keywords of consequences for Romantic studies. All these formations are magnetized for generative engagement. Romanticism as a school of reading keeps the antennae braced.