"Seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely"

Byron's poetry, Austen's prose and forms of narrative irony

Caroline Franklin

pp. 171-191

in: Alan Rawes (ed), Romanticism and form, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

In his 1983 polemic against Romanticists' "uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations", Jerome McGann selected as illlustration a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle on Jane Austen. Rather than recognising that not all great Romantic-period liter- ature is necessarily "Romantic", the contributors had attempted to rectify Austen's marginalisation from the canon simply by identifying "Romantic" aspects of her novels.³Persuasion drew particular notice, for scholars have often commented on its lyrical and melancholy tone.⁴ Such readings, however, had the effect of qualifying without really displacing the orthodox view of Austen as a Johnsonian moralist. Marilyn Butler's political reading of Austen as an Anti-Jacobin writer also left in place this impression of Augustan rather than Romantic ideo- logical and aesthetic affiliations.⁵ However, recent scholarship shows Austen was far from an anomaly. A whole spectrum of writers of the period continued to produce topical literary parodies, comedy and satire.⁶ The question of how to relate irony such as Austen's to "Romantic" writing is therefore rendered all the more pertinent.

Cited authors

McGann Jerome