Sonia Hofkosh will offer a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft as one among those apparently missing from Hazlitt’s all-male compendium of writers, thinkers, and political reformers. Taking as a model Hazlitt’s distinctive genre of the character sketch as an appraisal of the contribution to public culture informed by reflection on the personal lives of his subjects, Hofkosh will suggest that Wollstonecraft emerges as a ghostly presence within The Spirit of the Age, in that she shared with Hazlitt both a radical vision of the possibilities available to a future world and the experience of that potential unfulfilled in the present. This presentation will draw upon Hazlitt’s language in The Spirit of the Age to consider the ways in which the spirit of Romanticism was enacted or embodied in Wollstonecraft’s life and writing, and to examine how Romantic formulations continue to appear as concerns haunting our own contemporary moment.
Jennifer Wallace will consider the question of Romanticism’s strange temporality through a focus on two writers omitted from Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, namely Percy and Mary Shelley. Percy Shelley's utopian Prometheus Unbound (1820) investigates a slow glacial time in which a decision made centuries in the past has fateful consequences in the future. Meanwhile Mary Shelley's dystopian The Last Man (1826) digs up a prophecy from antiquity about a catastrophe still relatively far off in our future. Both works address the complex issues of time and responsibility through an archaeological poetics, finding auguries in the ruins of our times. At our critical juncture today, when we contemplate the strange temporality of climate change, the uncanny “futurity” of Romanticism demands a renewed interest.
Margaret Russett will examine the representation of William Godwin in Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age. Godwin—though still alive and writing—had descended to “a sort of posthumous fame” by 1825. According to Hazlitt, Godwin had become a ghost of his former self, haunting without animating contemporary political discourse. This was the ironic fate of a writer whose chief failing, in Hazlitt’s view, was his exaggerated faith in abstract reason, which turned human nature into “a logical machine.” This presentation will consider the relationship between the mechanics of Godwinian ratiocination and the concept of “spirit” which Godwin invoked to describe “things as they are."
Pablo San Martín Varela will explore Percy Shelley’s engagement with two different strands of enlightened discourse concerning the figure of the legislator. One of them stems from the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scots developed narratives of civil society based on political economy, which not only displaced sacred history, but also the classical narratives of individual agency (of rulers or “legislators”). This view of history raised significant difficulties for Shelley’s radical politics in the late 1810s, which can be observed in passages of A Philosophical View of Reform that cast doubt on the reformer’s or “true patriot’s” capacity to lead political change. Another, more empowering conception of political agency emerges in the impassioned lines on the “spirit of the age” that later found their way into A Defence of Poetry. Shelley deploys the character of the "legislator" amongst a plethora of materialist and spiritualist metaphors in an attempt to rethink the ways in which human agency, and particularly that of the poet, might relate to social change.
Session organization and diversity: This panel was selected by a peer review committee from among the submissions to an open CFP published by MLA, and it embodies exemplary diversity in gender, nationality, and type of university. The presenters offer a broad range of critical and theoretical perspectives upon the topic under discussion. To assure at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion, each presentation will be limited to a maximum of 15 minutes, and the Presider will discreetly notify each presenter as the end of their presentation timeframe approaches.