Romantic Temporalities

ABSTRACT This essay reviews recent treatments of time and temporality in Romantic literary studies. The essay first tracks how critics' operative conceptions of time—and the Romantic conceptions of time they focus on—have changed over the last few decades as critical methods have changed and observes that critics have increasingly analyzed the central social and intellectual tensions of the Romantic period in terms of the interactions among multiple temporalities. The second section considers critical studies not only of literary treatments of time but also of the temporality of reading literature. The essay concludes with a proposal that time spent reading has a texture similar to time spent in the company of another person.