of the period offers occasions for off-the-clock breaks as presence—in the present of reading—and as integral to modernity. And at stake in making the case for the sensibility chronotope as the refiguration of romance is to offer a way of understanding how this temporal conception is importantly tied—though not limited to—the genre of the novel.
William Wordsworth famously charges modern regularization with producing personalities afflicted with something like manic-depressive swings—“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” and that also reduces minds “to a state of almost savage torpor.”22 Romantic poetry aims to ameliorate this condition of manic craving followed by depressive torpor by offering for its readers occasions for pausing from the ordinary business of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth puts it in his sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.” It conceives of these lyrical pauses as tranquil recollections of passionate feeling, as Wordsworth would have it, or as intense insight being teased out of thought, as John Keats would have it. Thus Romantic poetry, as both reading material and a mode of thinking, offers its modern readers the opportunity to recompose into more varied and nuanced emotion and thinking. In its rural settings and its fascination with nature, such poetry’s alternative to the chronometric resonates with Bakhtin’s nostalgia for the idyll. And yet what distinguishes it from the chronotope that Bakhtin explores is its explicit the-matization of acts of poetic thinking as off-the-clock breaks in the present for its speakers and readers. Nostalgia for the idyll cannot transform chronometric consciousness and only offers its readers occasions to recall other possibilities located at other times and places. Romantic poetry, by contrast, offers itself as an alternative that can be realized in the here and now of poetic reading and thinking, even as such alternate durational experiences can materialize only as temporary breaks.
Through such studies as M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism and Michael Clune’s Writing Against Time, we have come to identify the possibility of pauses from our predominantly chronometric consciousness with the Romantic lyric and to take the alternative it offers as aiming for an atemporal eternity. Abrams maintains that the Romantics render significant moments as the “intersection of eternity with time” (385) and cast “timelessness as a quality of the experiential moment” (386).23 More recently, but in important ways similarly, Clune describes the “Romantic quest to defeat time” (17) as focused on art’s impossible ambition to sustain the intense sensory experience of first encounters.24 And yet I argue in this book that by recognizing a sensibility chronotope, we can identify the ways in which literature has offered itself as pauses from the chronometric that are thoroughly durational, rather than atemporal. Indeed, Christopher Miller and Julia Carlson in studies that attend more carefully to the ways in which Romanticism draws on earlier eighteenth-century sources have been able to recognize poetry’s mobilization of pacing and rhythm in techniques aimed to shape both represented durations and the duration of reading.25 I show that a comprehensive sensibility chronotope has already in the eighteenth century self-consciously and fully conceived of leisure reading as off-the-clock durational breaks, and that prose writing and especially novels have most thoroughly taken up this task. That novels featured and provided such pauses for alternative duration is a capacity of the genre that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers and authors were well aware of, but that more recent scholarship has by and large overlooked. It may be that the Romantic lyric’s more direct and programmatic response to the effects of rationalization has contributed to obscuring the ways in which an earlier sensibility approached this very same task. And yet the novel’s orientation toward alternative durations arises precisely from what Romantic lyric and early novels share: a self-conscious engagement with, and refiguration of, romance.
If in the last quarter of the eighteenth century “the romance revival had become a major scholarly and poetic industry,” as Ian Duncan puts it, then novels of sensibility have been preparing the grounds for such revival throughout the century.26 From the perspective of novels of sensibility, romance isn’t “revived” by Romanticism—neither by romantic lyric nor by the romantic novel—nor are Scott’s historical novels the first to recognize romance as a mode of historicization. What Duncan identifies as the insight Scott discovers and develops from Gothic romances is only one way by which romance historicizes: delivering itself, as Duncan recognizes, “as modern culture’s construction of a symbolic form prior to itself” (10–11). Romanticism continues early novels’ persistent refiguration of romance, which involves not only—or even primarily—chronological priority, but a commitment to probable temporal experiences whose logic is other than chronological or chronometric.
Novelistic realism emerges as part and parcel of a renewed interest in historicism—as narratives that aim to tell the truth in a particular form, one that, as Elizabeth Ermarth emphasizes, constitutes empiricist epistemology not only as a commitment to descriptive detail but also as the prizing of a serial continuity that conceives of identity by way of cross-temporal comparisons. Medieval historiography, Ermarth reminds, relied on “the contrast between time and eternity and not upon the contrast between past and present”; the latter—which is the premise of a modern historiography that emerges in the Renaissance—“homogenized the temporal medium by finding past and present mutually informative” (25).27 And, Ermarth continues, such interest in the revelations of sequence … finds its fullest aesthetic expression in the temporal medium of literature and its fullest literary expression in the realistic novel, where the unfolding of structure and significance receives its most thoroughgoing serial treatment” (41). But as Michael McKeon argues, if what we take to be novelistic realism emerges from the epistemic transformations of “the early modern historicist revolution” (53), then what immediately precedes novels and their realism never ceases to leave its traces in them.28 As McKeon points out, the form that precedes and persists most importantly in realist novels is romance. Romance has a remarkably long and diverse history, yet this genre endures, McKeon argues, because its most fundamental task is to figure an encounter of a nonhistoricist, nonchronometric mindset with a historicism that, more recently, we have come to identify as modern. Romance poses an alternative to such historicism precisely as it is embedded within it. McKeon’s brief discussion of the Greek enlightenment demonstrates how romance succeeds myth. Romance thus delivers an encounter with this enlightenment’s historical consciousness, rewriting mythic timelessness as “historical rupture between movement ‘forward’ and movement ‘back’” (32). And McKeon’s analysis of the twelfth-century Renaissance identifies romance as an encounter with historicism that continues to insist on a “qualitative standard of completeness” (38). If historicism pushes toward serial continuity, romance pushes toward an intuitive completeness that arises from human connectedness. “To be ‘true’ to another is a mode not of empirical veracity but of human connection coordinated by suprahuman principal [sic] or essence,” McKeon explains (38).
Ermarth proposes that genres succeed one another discretely—from medieval revelational history to modern empiricist chronology, from typological plots to realistic plots—while allowing transitional phases, which she identifies with eighteenth-century novelists such as Defoe and Richardson. McKeon argues that genres internalize one another as they progress—a historiography that reshapes myth, a novel that refigures romance—and thus his analysis opens up room for an investigation of the refiguration of romance within modern chronometric consciousness and its allied novel form. The Origins of the English Novel does precisely that, but McKeon focuses on the components of response that we might call ideology—how debates about questions of truth and virtue came to be clinched together, thus transmuting and incorporating the plots of romance into the plots of realism to support a liberal regime that can at once house conservatism and progressivism. However, we can find in novels much more varied and nuanced techniques—well beyond emplotments and the specific ideologies these promote—for transmuting the temporal logic of romance. As I demonstrate extensively in subsequent chapters, eighteenth-century novelists developed techniques ranging from sentence-level effects of rhythm to patterns of memory and anticipation foregrounding time-consciousness as the bare bones of realist character; they also carefully attended
