Haunting's consequences for the literary imagination.

Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading.

Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force.

Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers.

Haunting's consequences for the literary imagination.

About the Author

Susan J. Wolfson is a professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Reading John Keats and Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action.

Reviews
This challenging study of apparitional epistemology is not for the fainthearted. Including extensive and interesting page notes, this book is for specialists with a linguistic background.
-Choice
A magnificent achievement in verse reading-and prose reading-and, indeed, reading of a range of significant Romantic authorships in their historic moments. It should be welcomed by everyone with a ready eye.
-Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge, Review of English Studies
How supremely quotable Wolfson is. From beginning to end, Romantic Shades and Shadows is engrossing, challenging, and deeply rewarding, one of the very best books published on Romantic poetry this decade. It will haunt us all.
-Oliver Clarkson, Balliol College, Essays in Criticism
There are treasures in all of these chapters.
-Michael Wood, London Review of Books
[Wolfson's] witty meditation on the complex textual admixture of the intentional and the unintentional reveals both how much various writers know and how much they don't seem to know (or remember) that they know. Consuming their work, the sentient reader (whom Wolfson models for us) grows ever more aware of the mind-bending complexity of the referentiality of words that have been used, abused, reused, refashioned, repurposed in ways that trace their shadowy prior lives in the wordy works of any writer's contemporaries and predecessors.
-Stephen Behrendt, University af Nebraska, European Romantic Review
The extensive critical and literary reach of Romantic Shades and Shadows is impressive . . . Wolfson is not alone in acknowledging the ghostliness of Romantic poetics. Yet her inventive readings of the spectral, its haunts, and hauntings do press upon us the necessity, as Nietzsche writes, of having 'friends as ghosts' if we are, as Wolfson's Afterword urges, to penetrate beneath the textual surface and hear the hauntingly instructive voices of past, present, and future shades.
-Mark Sandy, Durham University, Modern Language Review
Though Romantic Shades and Shadows is an elegant account of the hauntings of and by Romanticism in their own right, it is also a generous and invaluable schooling on the author's behalf in a necromantic approach to reading poetry and prose more generally. We surely derive as much pleasure from this book in the access that it affords us into the creative yet rigorous turns of Wolfson's own mind as we do from the critical insights into Romanticism that it yields. The result is nothing less than paradigm-shifting. Enjoined, along Coleridgean lines, to suspend our disbelief and to join Wolfson in her startling necromantic pursuits, we as readers and critics might only emerge from Romantic Shades and Shadows suitably changed, humbled, haunted.
-Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University, Criticism
Wolfson has given us more than one masterclass in the art of retaining and connecting the complexities of an individual author-poet to his or her textual worlds . . . This is a book in which Wolfson returns to texts and poets that are both the back catalogue and the present focus of her critical practice, demonstrating the haunting and enduring power of those words which matter to us most. Romantic Shades and Shadows is testimony to that recognition.
-Jane Moore, Cardiff University, Literature and History
[Wolfson's] formalism is refreshing in the way that it refuses to subsume formal features under historical or political contexts. At the same time, when teasing out meanings, she does not sequester texts from history but shows how poetry and prose reverberate in social and cultural situations. This is a major gain . . . Wolfson has written a deeply intelligent study that demonstrates the rewards of formalist criticism, not least for its alertness to the fundamental instability of Romantic poetics.
-Robert W. Rix, University of Copenhagen, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies



Book Information
ISBN 9781421425542
Author Susan J. Wolfson
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 499g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm