ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most pressing attack upon the Romantic position is the one voiced by my pupil Alan in that GCSE lesson on Tennyson’s Mariana described in the previous chapter – the plea for what Jürgen Habermas described as ‘instrumental rationality’ (Habermas 1970). Alan did not want to read Victorian poetry anymore because he regarded its concerns and its discourses as irrelevant to the concerns and discourses of the working adult world he was about to enter.
