Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger

“Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger is a wonderfully engaged and engaging book. Compelling and elegant at every turn, it is widely and deeply informed, addressing an enormous and varied Romantic archive while also demonstrating a masterful grasp of contemporary theoretical discussions about strangers and strangeness. A searching and felicitous intelligence quickens the project from its expansive beginning to its deeply moving conclusion. Written with uncommon purposiveness, David Simpson’s powerfully realized book may be rooted in Romanticism but it tells a history of vexed encounters with others through which we are still living.”

“With his astonishing range of reference, David Simpson offers a powerful literary history and theory of ‘the stranger syndrome,’ the subtle dialectic of hostility and hospitality in Romanticism and its early-twenty-first-century afterlife. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger encompasses the wide and eclectic field of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writing, not just the authors and texts most often associated with the period. In examples both surprising and revelatory, Simpson’s study also reveals the ubiquity and variety of the stranger, who appears not only in the form of alien persons but also in less obvious guises: in practices of translation between languages, attempts at religious conversion, footnotes and other paratext, metaphor, and the nature of literary language itself. As in his earlier work, Simpson writes at once as a prominent literary scholar and an incisive public intellectual, and in both capacities, he issues a forceful warning against failing to ‘reckon with the stranger,’ whether by acts of exclusion, by making distinctions and patrolling their boundaries, or by suspecting the stranger from outside while failing to recognize the strangeness and estrangement inside—within the self, home, or homeland.”

“Simpson makes for an expert guide, his deft and dynamic analysis forging unexpected pathways through the familiar terrain of Romantic writing, and his notion of the stranger supplying an illuminating new lens through which to re-perceive the Romantic canon. Where the book excels, though, is in its quietly insistent sense of the pertinence of Romantic writing and the conviction with which it makes its case for the Romantic claim to modernity. . . . This is an unusual book, sometimes odd, always rewarding, illuminating in its analysis and dexterous in its range. . . . It is the kind of book that encourages the reader’s speculations to stray from home, extending in directions beyond its own Romantic literary remit. As Simpson’s provocative readings illustrate, the question of the stranger might concern not only those mysterious others whom we hold off at the hearth but also that which we refuse to recognise within.”