Abstract
The introduction to Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms surveys the complicated history of the term “Romanticism” and then introduces Michael Löwy’s and Robert Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity as presenting a plausible definition of Romanticism that makes possible the incorporation of rock music under its umbrella. Defining Romanticism as an essentially emotional reaction to a modernity that is inherently capitalist, this introduction makes careful distinctions among the terms “Romanticism,” “Enlightenment,” and “Marxism” and then suggests that the historical conditions following World War II are meaningfully similar to those of eighteenth-century Europe. It then explains this volume’s focus on the Gothic and its relationship to Romanticism and discusses the tradition of the Female Gothic as it summarizes each chapter.
I am indebted to Sherry Truffin and Steve Wexler for generous feedback on this introduction.
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Notes
- 1.
Bruce Armstrong, “R.I.P. Gregg Allman,” Correspondence, Rolling Stone 1293 (August 10, 2017): 6.
- 2.
Donald Fitch , Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). Full text available online at http://www.ucpress.edu/op.php?isbn=9780520097346. Supplement published 2001 at BIQ 35, no. 2 (Fall 2001): http://bq.blakearchive.org/35.2.fitch. See also G.E. Bentley, Jr.’s review of volume 5 of Blake Set to Music in BiQ 30, no. 1 (Summer 1996): http://bq.blakearchive.org/30.1.bentley and Ashanka Kumari’s thesis, “Adding to Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography,” at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1092&context=englishdiss. All URLs last accessed January 4, 2017.
- 3.
See G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004): “…and though according to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good, that his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, and were noted down by musical professors” (120–1).
- 4.
FitzGreene Halleck, ed., “Letter CCCCLVIII,” The Works of Lord Byron; in Verse and Prose. Including His Letters, Journals, Etc. with a Sketch of His Life (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus & Son, 1847), 162.
- 5.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229.
- 6.
Ibid., 232.
- 7.
Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA 66, no. 2 (Mar. 1951), 5–23.
- 8.
Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), xiii.
- 9.
Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 17.
- 10.
Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984): 46. Note that references to the article will be “Sayre and Löwy” while references to the book will be “Löwy and Sayre.”
- 11.
Ibid., 51.
- 12.
Most essays make reference to Löwy and Sayre, some relying on them extensively, which will bring into focus a diversity of readings of this text as well.
- 13.
Löwy and Sayre, 90.
- 14.
Ibid., 89.
- 15.
Ibid., 56.
- 16.
Ibid., 25.
- 17.
David Pichaske, A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979), 3.
- 18.
Ibid., 2.
- 19.
Ibid., 7.
- 20.
Steven Cassedy, “Beethoven the Romantic: How E.T.A. Hoffman Got It Right,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (Jan. 2010): 2.
- 21.
Ibid., 5.
- 22.
Ibid., 6.
- 23.
Löwy and Sayre, 54.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid., 60.
- 26.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed., trans. Angus Davidson with a forward by Frank Kermode (London: Oxford UP, 1970), 1.
- 27.
Ibid., 11.
- 28.
Ibid., 14.
- 29.
Ibid., 27.
- 30.
Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3, 11–12.
- 31.
Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 175.
- 32.
Fred Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10.
- 33.
See Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), xiii.
- 34.
Marshall Brown, “Romanticism and Enlightenment,” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), 38.
- 35.
Ibid., 34.
- 36.
Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 2.
- 37.
Ibid., 18.
- 38.
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death defines despair in its worst form as “the hopelessness of not even being able to die,” a state describing Byron’s Manfred . This inability to die is an expression of the self’s desire not to be itself. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980), 18.
- 39.
See Sherry Truffin’s essay in this volume for further discussion of this issue.
- 40.
Löwy and Sayre, 21.
- 41.
Ibid., 21.
- 42.
Ibid., 31.
- 43.
See Joel Faflak’s Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (SUNY Press, 2009), Laura Quinney’s William Blake on Self and Soul (Harvard UP, 2010), James Rovira’s Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2010), David Sigler’s Sexual Enjoyment and British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis 1753–1835 (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015), and Markus Iseli’s Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), all of which discuss in some way Romanticism as an early form of psychoanalysis.
- 44.
Löwy and Sayre , 34, 41.
- 45.
Williams, 240.
- 46.
Ibid., 241.
- 47.
Baldick , xx.
- 48.
Löwy and Sayre, 42. Compare this observation to Kierkegaard’s definition of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety: “The demonic is unfreedom that wants to close itself off … The demonic is inclosing reserve [det Indesluttede] and the unfreely disclosed.” See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980), 123.
- 49.
Löwy and Sayre, 38.
- 50.
See Baldick : “a Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse…) with such weight as to stifle the hopes of the present … within the dead-end of physical incarceration” (xix).
- 51.
Ibid., 68.
- 52.
Ibid., 32, 25.
- 53.
Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, eds. Simon Frith , Will Straw, John Street (London: Cambridge UP, 2011), 135.
- 54.
Ibid., 136.
- 55.
Eminem, musically, is outside the boundaries of what is usually called “rock,” but as we will see his work fits well within the paradigms established here for dark Romanticism.
- 56.
William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon, eds., The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 251.
- 57.
See Gamer ch. 3, “‘Gross and violent stimulants’: Producing Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800.”
- 58.
Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, eds., The Female Gothic: New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.
- 59.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed., trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford UP, 1970), 14, 27.
- 60.
Ibid., 27.
- 61.
Williams, 175.
- 62.
Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Bröntes (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1998), 7.
- 63.
See Wallace and Smith for a recent approach to the female Gothic in scholarship: the term is contested, discarded, and recovered. See also Lauren Fitzgerald’s claim in that volume that Moers’s early formulation of the female Gothic is part of the Gothic tradition itself (22).
- 64.
Cosmo Lee and Stewart Voegtlin, “Into the Void: Stylus Magazine’s Beginner’s Guide to Metal,” Stylus, July 09, 2006, http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/into-the-void-stylus-magazines-beginners-guide-to-metal.htm.
- 65.
“Open Call 2015: The Complete List of Albums Proposed for the 33 1/3 Series,” 333sound, July 29, 2015, https://333sound.com/2015/07/29/open-call-2015-the-complete-list-of-albums-proposed-for-the-33-13-series/. Accessed January 5, 2017.
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Rovira, J. (2018). Introduction: Theorizing Rock/Historicizing Romanticism. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_1
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