Towards a Labouring-Class Poetics: Recovering Edward Rushton

The notion of ‘lost Romantics’ requires one to engage in questions of historical and ideological as well as aesthetic order, pointing as it does towards the processes underlying the inclusion, no less than the exclusion, of texts, discourses, and histories from the perceived canon of literature (itself a contested notion), as produced over that particular historical segment—in other words, its own status as synecdoche of a ‘whole’, the nature of which is permeable to change.It also implicitly questions the way we teach Romanticism, how we shape and hand down knowledge to the younger generations of undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students. The subject is of great relevance, to the extent that the acquisition and transmission of critical awareness of the mechanisms whereby a canon is constructed, and texts are absorbed into or expelled from the circuits of knowledge transmission, is in many ways a matter regarding politics, as integral in the method no less than the merit of what we do.As to the merit, it may well be argued that focalising on ‘marginal’, or ‘forgotten’, or ‘lost’ Romantics inherently embraces the study of how power relations are substantiated into and shape the repositories of literary culture