Decorated initial T

Instead, cultural memory increasingly took mediated forms and required self-conscious interventions. The premodern world was imagined as a place in which cultural memory was pervasive and mundane, experienced in the everyday lives of individuals through a comparatively stable sense of belonging and continuity with the past. In this premodern world, people “were able to live within memory.”32 In the modern world, by contrast, this kind of immersion in cultural memory was no longer available, and so cultural memory had to be crystallized in what Pierre Nora calls lieux de memoire. Cultural memory, as Raphael Samuel insists, is not a passive storage system but a dynamic, historically conditioned force, “changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of the moment.”33 When cultural memory ceased to be everywhere, it became newly visible somewhere, located in specific sites and often mediated in new ways. [14] While the Victorians were keen to save some aspects of Romantic writing”^ from the forgetfulness of history, they were just as eager that other aspects should be consigned to oblivion, and the sooner the better. Political commitments, religious opinions, and sexual dissidence all had to be soft-pedaled in the Victorians’ efforts to remake Romantic writers’ reputations and recirculate their works. This was true not only of radicals, freethinkers, and advocates of free love such as Shelley, but also of a Tory like Scott, whose close association with a particular political context threatened to limit his appeal in the age of Reform. The web of reception highlighted certain facets of the Romantics’J reputations and certain parts of their oeuvres, but it also cast others into shade. The Victorian fascination with the past was therefore a distinctly modern one. Turning back to even the recent past required efforts of recovery. Romantic writers and their works seemed to be slipping into history by the middle of the nineteenth century, and they needed to be renovated for the present. [15]

Bibliography

Mole, Tom. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History. Princeton: Princeton University press, 2018.


Last modified 9 February 2017