Abstract
Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: Romanticism’s future-oriented poetics. This book explores the epistemological uncertainties that arise from the sense of an unknowable futurity at the outset of the nineteenth century. It situates that uncertainty in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity’s Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—“what might will have been”—the imagining of the historical present as opening up a range of interpretive and dramatic possibilities, whereby the present becomes a process that will always remain incomplete. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity’s Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age, and it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetic grammar of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical dimensions of the present when faced with the temporal situation of modernity.
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