‘Ruinous Perfection’: Reading Authors and Writing Readers in Romantic Fragments

Abstract

Romantic fragments, although readily identifiable, are as diffuse in kind as in form. Romanticism’s fascination with the fragmentary is mani- fest in numerous works that are either textually fragmented (whether by dint of design or accident) or complete literary forms that treat ruins as a central subject. Interest in the fragment in the period trans- gresses traditional generic boundaries. This transcendence of formal categories necessitated the exclusion of Romantic fragments from Stuart Curran’s survey of Poetic Form and British Romanticism and warranted their central place in Marjorie Levinson’s study of The Romantic Frag- ment Poem.¹ Avoiding certain formal issues, Levinson’s historicising method places poetic fragments of the Romantic period within their wider ideological, cultural and biographical context as a means of legit- imatising these incomplete textual forms. Levinson’s historicist sense of the social, cultural and political horizons of the nineteenth century regulates the dynamic between the author’s text and the reader, but occludes those peculiar atemporal demands of a Romantic culture of posterity.² Breaking with this historicising tendency, this chapter shares an affinity with Balachandra Rajan’s thematic reflections in The Form of the Unfinished and focuses on anachronistic posthumous exchanges between deceased author and future reader.³