Orrin Wang

Orrin Wang specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge.

Wang not only provides provocative readings of a range of literary texts but also makes an argument that will be hard to ignore for the continuing metatheoretical importance of Romanticism in the field of literature and knowledge more generally.

This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory.

Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Brontë, and Keats.

Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications on literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

Focusing on the convergence of Romantic studies and literary theory over the past twenty-five years, Wang pairs a series of contemporary critics with 'originary' Romantic writers in order to illuminate the work of both the contemporary theorist and earlier Romantic. Wang examines Paul de Man's deconstructive use of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jerome McGann's Marxist-influence appropriation of Heinrich Heine, and Harold Bloom's pragmatic reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through these examinations, along with commentary on Keats, Jameson, Lovejoy, and Spitzer, Fantastic Modernity attempts a series of new readings of both the theory being used by the various critics and the primary Romantic texts under consideration.

Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness. Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.