INTRODUCTION: REMANENT ROMANTICISM IN MODERN POETRY

International audienceThis article is the introduction to issue n° 12 (2005) of the journal Cercles: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone, an anthology of articles in English entitled Remanent Romanticism in Modern English Poetry. Romanticism, and especially romantic poetry have acquired a new visibility in the late 20th century, notably as a result of the impact of New Historicists like Jerome McGann, and of the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the contrasted receptions of the Romantics in France and Germany. Partly as a result of these reassessments, the alleged breach between Romanticism and Modernism seems no longer so self-evident, and appears in a large part as a construct of the self-defining discourse of the most eloquent Modernists. This paper and the articles it introduces reflect on several ways in which modernist and post-modernist poetry can be viewed less as a radical rupture with the romantic agenda, than as a continuation of several of its quests by other means