Realism and the Romantic Essay

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book addresses a shift from the versions of knowing the world or other that predominate in the literature of the early part of the nineteenth century to those that develop by the end of the century. Reviving, in its methodology, a now nearly obsolete critical mode, the source study, it tracks in the transition from certain essayists of the Romantic era to their Victorian successors, a changing relation between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’, or ‘self’ and ‘other’. Naming as ‘realism’, an English literary practice of the nineteenth century that, mimetic in its expression, remains committed to the absolute and uncompromised reality of the other, it argues for the importance of the Romantic essay to the genesis and evolution of this practice. The familiar or conversational essay is key to its argument, but the book draws widely, too, on pertinent material in other essay forms: the critical essay, the character sketch, and its near relation, the biographical portrait. The literary history that it narrates discloses by the way the extent of William Hazlitt’s intellectual legacy to the later writers of the century. The progression from Romantic to post-Romantic thought is marked in this history by the gradual demise of the Romantic imagination. From that demise, and the shrinking, consequent upon it, at once of the self and the modern world that it inhabits, arises a new and peculiarly Victorian persuasion of other grounds—or the absence—of moral possibility.</jats:p>