ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the difficulty of escaping Romantic ideology, and extents to which its prime category of the aesthetic might already contain the political debates which Romantic ideology is often thought to elide. The Romantic genealogy of the aesthetic politicizes this reflexivity by proposing a model in which it can only reproduce ideology by criticizing it. Its history then records dialectic between the ideological containment of criticism and the critical transgression of ideology. Like all dialectics it is tensed between restrictions which ensure that self-criticisms do not threaten its identity, and the revolutionary alternatives which these criticisms nevertheless inspire. The most enlightening criticism of Romantic internalization comes from McGann. Here is one of his earlier formulations: The poetic response to the age's severe political and social dislocations was to reach for solutions in the realm of ideas. Romantic period as one marked by 'epistemological crisis' follows Romanticism's own definition of its historical problems.
