New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the disciplines early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary studys nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of Englishthe vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Criticsin the new light of the American universitys tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary studys profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyrics special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of Englishs professional identity all along.
New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovees historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransoms and William Wordsworths shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the immature Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-centurys preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.