Taking Chances

This essay surveys an argument about history, futurity, and narrative shapes in Romantic writing by way of some working principles and specific instances that together articulate the inquiry implied by my title. Briefly put, I understood “taking chances” as something like a slogan for a way of understanding possibility that returns, with different emphases across Romantic writing. This essay accordingly maps a larger terrain, but does so by showing how that terrain might also be grasped more locally, in writing drawn from different strands of Romantic thought. My working argument is that the notion of progress, and the hope of