SOURCE: “Postmodernism, Romanticism, and John Clare” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, edited by Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 157-70.

In the following essay, Kelley uses Clare's work to argue that postmodernism “foregrounds the sense of extremity and strangeness that haunts Romanticism.”

My remarks in this essay shuttle between two recent works of fiction and the writing of John Clare to suggest how postmodernism—as theory as well as fictional practice—reiterates and thereby foregrounds the sense of extremity and strangeness that haunts Romanticism. Put more contentiously, this essay considers how postmodernism—when it is not a late-blooming species of modernism—revisits Romanticism with something like the ferocious yet dry intensity of John Clare, both sane and mad. What I mean by such claims follows from my understanding of modernism as alienated consciousness, eager to break with its antecedents in order to...