Andrea K. Henderson. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life‪.‬

Andrea K. Henderson. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 295. $90.00. Andrea K. Henderson's terrific new study intervenes smartly in the recent debates over Romantic individualism in relation to modern developments in economics ("finance capitalism") and politics (liberalism, democracy). Turning on its head the conventional notion--shared by the Romantics themselves--that Romanticism is best understood as a form of expression (and mode of existence) that consciously rises above and is independent of circumstance, and that is made possible by sheer passion and imagination, Henderson contends that expressions of the primacy of individual agency are everywhere in the Romantic period enmeshed with a simultaneous recognition of unattainable ideals, imposing modern forms of authority, and pressures to submit to outside forces. What appears on one level, during the Romantic period, to be a newly discovered culture of uninhibited individual freedom is, on another, in fact an emerging consciousness shaped within the reality of modern life as defined by capitalism, consumerism, and democratic sensibilities. This view is not so much an argument about the Romantic claim of freedom made under the conditions of its denial as it is an argument about the Romantic effort to negotiate the conflicting awareness of the possibilities of freedom and the denial of gratification.