Paul Magnuson. Reading Public Romanticism.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv+217. $39.50 cloth.

In Reading Public Romanticism, Paul Magnuson not only presents fresh readings of canonical romantic poems located within their public, historical contexts, but also, and uniquely, explores a useful methodology for responsible contextual reading. In charting the various ways romantic texts overtly and covertly engage figuratively with the public discourse surrounding their early publications, Magnuson indeed, as his title suggests, reveals a convincing "public romanticism" as an alternative or supplement to traditional readings of the self-contained, esthetically-bounded romantic poem. The book also presents an alternative to various new-historicist readings which would posit a romanticism that privatizes the imagination and thereby evades any social or public engagement. The "Introduction" and first two chapters explore "a methodology of historical close reading, reading the public discourse that constitutes the discursive field in which literary works are located" (3). The following four chapters illustrate this with splendidly detailed close readings of the paratexts and public writings informing such hyper-canonical romantic works as "Frost at Midnight," Lyrical Ballads, Don Juan, and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Central to this study is the attention given to a poem's "location" within the public discourse: "The public significance of a literary work rests, not in itself, not within its own generic boundaries, but in its locations for the simple reason that without precise location, there is no cultural significance" (3). Aware that some readers may be wary of reducing the well-wrought literary work to a commentary on and within the public discourse, Magnuson asserts: "My intention is not to substitute a political reading for an esthetic one, but to read...

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