Romanticism and Consciousness, Then and Now

We begin with a rather sweeping, even reckless claim: perhaps no other essay collection more influenced Romantic studies than Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970), edited by Harold Bloom. We say this partly in light of the recent passing of Professor Bloom (1930–2019), whose stamp on Romantic studies, not only because of his staggering output, suggests the voice of a kind of undeniable prophetic-ness, however much that voice agitated both for and against critical fashion. Impact is never registered solely by any one critic, however singular and influential, but in the ascendance of Romantic studies as a field unto itself, Romanticism and Consciousness appeared at a pivotal moment. British Liberal Humanism and later North American New Criticism had left their marks upon earlier twentieth-century literary studies and embraced Romantic writing and its authors with varying enthusiasm. On the horizon loomed deconstruction, poststructuralism, and their various after-effects in new historicism, feminism, cultural studies, or postcolonialism. As if to mediate this epochal shift in criticism, Bloom's volume emerged to articulate the mind of Romanticism as mind, as the consciousness of a single and singular moment in history. Or rather, such a negotiation reified Romantic studies as it had rarely been consolidated before, albeit according to what Jerome McGann would call the critical ideology of what any time imagines Romanticism to be. By this measure, Romanticism and Consciousness offered its own sweeping anatomy of the field, one not nearly as multifarious and diverse as we have since found it to be. Yet the volume's claim to apprehend the period as consciousness, which is to say as conscious of itself in a way that earlier periods had not been, marks Romanticism as a watershed moment in the emergence of modernity that makes unthinkable subsequent challenges to criticism's reading of Romanticism as a cognitive synthesis rather than overdetermination of ideas or history. That it is still in print more than five decades later indicates its lasting influence.

This is also to say, then, that since the volume's publication, most of what we thought we knew about consciousness has been challenged. Where Bloom and his contributors privileged a self-consciousness rooted in the singular mind and body, consciousness today is hell-bent on the world and on a version of an embodied subject immersed in the world.