Tim Fulford. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Hampshire and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 1999. Pp. 250. $75.00

In the last twenty years it has become increasingly accepted that romanticism is an historically and variously gendered phenomenon, in terms of both the social, political, and literary practices of the time and the reception and scholarship responding to these practices. In Romanticism and Masculinity Tim Fulford promises a new approach to our understanding of the role of gender, particularly masculinity, in the politics and poetics of the male romantic canon. Exaggerating the extent to which previous scholars have not attended to the gender differences among the canonical writers, Fulford suggests that "[t]he more nuanced picture will show them arguing with each other, contradicting themselves, as they strove to dispute about and differ from the ways in which gender and authority were intertwined in the political sphere" (17). Forging his argument as "a study of the anxiety of influence amongst a group of writers who knew each other" (15), Fulford positions Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Reflections on the Revolution in France as the pivotal texts that solidify the dominant discourse on gender difference and capture the thinking of all following romantic writers--suggesting that only the early Coleridge, the later Cobbett, and Wordsworth in different ways come close to deconstructing, overturning, and usurping respectively Burke's discourse. Like previous scholars, Fulford wants to interlink the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politics of the time to the poetics of gender within romantic writing. "Chivalric manhood did not die," he writes; "it was relocated in the middle classes," so that "the appearance of proper authority and good government stayed masculine even as they passed from the exclusive grasp of the nobility" (9).

Although Fulford wants to demonstrate the diversity of masculinities, and thus the diverse relations to the feminine in romantic writing, in the end his actual case studies tend to present a rather tight homosocial network of writers whose enactments of masculinity remain constant, even as their politics change over time and from...

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