But my review also suggests the problem with the anti-contextualist mood-method: essentially, that it turns literary history to a rather over-refined sort of non-literary historiography. Michael the abandoned old man, washed up on the strand of history, looks considerably different after reading Pfau. Focusing in on Pfau’s treatment of Wordsworth's "Michael", I suggest the critical gain enabled by his method: "The poem’s staging of Michael’s slow awakening to – or, rather, his faltering remembrance of the missed evidence of – his implication in macrocosmic historical shifts (Pfau 207–208) is, thus, an attempt not to escape but to realise the historical Something never actually intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form" (Pfau, 7). Rather, in its rhetorical and formal-aesthetic sedimentation, mood speaks – if only circumstantially – to the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history as In Pfau's words: "When approached as a latent principle bestowing enigmatic coherence on all social and discursive practice at a given moment, ‘mood’ opens up a new type of historical understanding: no longer referential, thematic, or accumulatively contextual. Imprint - re-readable as "mood" - of "missed" historical experience (Pfau 25). Pfau proposes that the "formal consistency" of every cultural artefact and historical narrative necessarily bears the legible
In establishing this relationship between mood and voice, Pfau moves away from the conventional understanding of emotion as something "owned" or exclusively attributable to the individual and toward a theory of mood as fundamentally intersubjective and deserving of broader consideration in the study of Romanticism.This is a review essay of Thomas Pfau's "Romantic Moods", engaging and partly contesting Pfau's anti-contextualist programme for literary history. Pfau's ambitious study traces the evolution of Romantic interiority by exploring the deep-seated reverberations of historical change as they become legible in new discursive and conceptual strategies and in the evolving formal-aesthetic construction and reception of Romantic literature.
Romantic Moods positions emotion as a "climate of history" to be interpretively recovered from the discursive and imaginative writing in which it is objectively embodied. Along the trajectory of Romantic thought paranoia characterizes the disintegration of traditional models of causation and representation during the French Revolution trauma, the radical political, cultural, and economic restructuring of Central Europe in the Napoleonic era and melancholy, the dominant post-traumatic condition of stalled, post-Napoleonic history both in England and on the continent. Pfau focuses on three specific paradigms of emotive experience: paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Drawing on a multifaceted philosophical tradition ranging from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger―incorporating as well the psychosocial analyses of Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno―Pfau develops a new understanding of the Romantic writer's voice as the formal encryption of a complex cultural condition. Thomas Pfau reinterprets the evolution of British and German Romanticism as a progress through three successive dominant moods, each manifested in the "voice" of an historical moment.
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