Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its
future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its
relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological
uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a
radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of
periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age"
increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the
historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. While historicist
critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers
would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers
felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age.
Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt
used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic
grammar of future anteriority-of uncertainty concerning what will have
been. Romantic writers,
she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works
make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced
with the temporalities of modernity.