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.
"In Modernity's Mist Emily Rohrbach has written a counter-history to Nietzsche's account of modernity as the story of the present indebting itself to the future by making a promise to it. She has given us a non-apocalyptic framework for understanding Romanticism's secular engagement with a future whose inscrutability makes it neither necessarily redemptive nor destructive. Remarkable here is not j
University of California, Berkeley
"Emily Rohrbach's Modernity's Mist is an imaginatively conceived, scrupulously researched, and beautifully written work of Romantic literary criticism."
University of Oregon
"For too long critics and scholars have focused concerns about Romantic futurity in the pyrotechnical, apocalyptic texts of Blake and company. Rohrbach, in a series of original readings, sets our sights on more pervasive, everyday engagements with the future. Her exemplary, well-chosen authors, especially Keats, feel the pressure of the future on the present and tend not to resort to the Bible, a
