By exposing the theory of romance to the romance of theory, Diane Elam explores literature’s most uncertain, least easily definable and most tenacious genre, assessing its implications for both feminism and the understanding of history. Arguing for a parallel between postmodernism’s divided relation to modernism and romance’s difficult stance towards realism, Romancing the Postmodern, first published in 1992, not only highlights how postmodernism questions our assumptions about historical time, it also reintroduces the figure of woman to the theory of both history and literature.

Original Scholarly Monograph

Ever since the shocking revelations of the fascist ties of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism’s infatuation with fascism has been extensive and widespread. He questions postmodernism’s claim to have inherited the mantle of the Left, suggesting instead that it has long been enamored with the opposite end of the political spectrum. Wolin reveals how, during in the 1930s, C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot were seduced by fascism's promise of political regeneration and how this misapprehension affected the intellectual core of their work. The result is a compelling and unsettling reinterpretation of the history of modern thought. In a new preface, Wolin revisits this illiberal intellectual lineage in light of the contemporary resurgence of political authoritarianism.

Using romantic theories, Caton analyzes America’s contemporary novel. Organized through the two sections of “Theory” and “Practice,” Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics begins with a study of aesthetic form only to have it reveal the content of politics and history. This presentation immediately offers a unified platform for an interchange between multiple cultural and aesthetic positions. Romantic theory provides for an integrated examination of diversity, one that metaphorically fosters a solid, inclusive, and democratic legitimacy for intercultural communication. This politically astute cosmopolitan appreciation will generate an intriguing “cross-over” audience: from ethnic studies to American studies and from literary studies to romantic studies, this book will interest a range of readers.

Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.

The persistence of Romantic thought and literary practice into the late twentieth century is evident in many contexts, from the philosophical and ideological abstractions of literary theory to the thematic and formal preoccupations of contemporary fiction and poetry. Though the precise meaning of the Romantic legacy is contested, it remains stubbornly difficult to move beyond. This collection of essays by prominent critics and literary theorists was first published in 1999, and explores the continuing impact of Romanticism on a variety of authors and genres, including John Barth, William Gibson, and John Ashbery, while writers from the Romantic and Victorian period include Wordsworth, Byron and Emily Brontë. Many critics have assumed that the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continued to influence the cultural history of the the first half of the twentieth century. This was the first book to consider the mutual impact of postmodernism and Romanticism.