INTRODUCTION: THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

When I began contacting potential contributors to this special issue on the Romantic novel I grew to expect a certain response: "Well, maybe I could do something on . .. well, maybe something on Frankenstein . . ." Ask literary academics to name a Romantic novel and, even without pausing to think, many will say Frankenstein. Ask them to name a Romantic text of just any genre and many will still come up with Shelley's most popular novel. This pattern merits scrutiny for several reasons. It reveals not only the rapid and exciting expansion of the old canon associated with "the Romantic period" (and specifically poetry as its most characteristic and accomplished genre), but also how writers who reflected some of the most interesting features of Romantic thought?yet were later excluded from the canon?are now being returned to it. Two years ago I taught a Keats and Shelley graduate seminar and several people were surprised that the Shelley to be discussed was Mary rather than Percy. If they had been more aware of developments in Romantic scholarship over the last ten to twenty years, however, this would have been far less of a surprise. Instead, they might have wondered why the class was not on Hemans and Shelley, or Radcliffe and Shelley, or ... I could go on and on. This reconfiguration of the canon also extends into the realm of pedagogy. What texts should be included in a graduate survey of the Romantic novel? Do you teach a "traditional" rendition of the Romantic novel canon so that your students, who face a job market that could be used to define "abjection," can show search committees they know what used to be considered the Romantic novel, or do you teach a canon that reflects any one of the many "wild frontiers" now available? A compromise may look something like this: begin with Walpole and Burney and, after various representative novels in between, end up with Austen and Peacock. But that means the reading list runs from 1764 {The Castle of Otranto) to 1860 (Gryll Grange), hardly the traditionally neat span of 1798 to 1832 delegated to Romanticism. Anyone who subscribes to electronic bulletin boards or attends academic conferences is well aware of the recent significant rearrangements of the