Romantic Fiat

Romantic Fiat

Author: E. Lindstrom

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0230299415

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In the Romantic period's economics of 'fiat' money the legacy of romanticism involves absolutist gestures of verbal fiat. Focused on William Wordsworth, but in constant range of his poet-successors and modern critics, Romantic Fiat presents an argument for a double romantic signature of 'let there be' and 'let be.'


Romantic Prayer

Romantic Prayer

Author: Christopher Stokes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-01-21

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0192599666

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Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, Romantic Prayer shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer was much contested, poetry--a form with its own interlinked history with prayer--was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer's historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, Romantic Prayer turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer, culminating in an explicit 'philosophy' of prayer; William Wordsworth--by contrast--keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist, and atheist critiques--what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language traditionally conceived is becoming impossible to maintain?


Blank Splendour

Blank Splendour

Author: David Collings

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2024-07-31

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1487556063

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Certain moments in British Romantic poetry and art depict a state from which the attributes of existence – time and space, subject and object, language and visuality – have fallen away, leaving a domain prior to the world and to thought, the condition of mere existence. As Blank Splendour demonstrates, poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Clare as well as paintings by Turner evoke a condition that transpires in a time without time, a life without life. David Collings argues that these works invite us to move beyond the subtle remnants of ontology that linger in current versions of posthuman thought, such as affect theory and speculative realism, by opening up a domain of affect without affect, a world without objects. Anticipating the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, these works bring into view the mode of a deconstruction that emerged before the linguistic turn, one that meditates on the blank condition underlying modernity. Ultimately, Blank Splendour reveals how these works speak to our own moment, when thought, forced to contemplate its own extinction, enters a new form of mere existence.


Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism

Author: Jacques Khalip

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0823271056

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Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the historical constellation, which puts both “contemporary” and “romanticism” in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism—from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics—this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin’s conception of history: These critics “grasp the constellation” into which our “own era has formed with a definite earlier one.” Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism’s singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism’s contemporary “redemption value” for painting and politics, philosophy and film?


Revealing Bodies

Revealing Bodies

Author: Erin Goss

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1611483948

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Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly one's own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's cosmological depiction of the body's origin in such works as The First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighe's reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.


Aphoristic Modernity

Aphoristic Modernity

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004400060

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For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.


Look Round for Poetry

Look Round for Poetry

Author: Brian McGrath

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0823299813

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Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.


Grasmere 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Grasmere 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Author: Richard Gravil

Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks

Published: 2012-12-31

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1847602363

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Five keynote lectures and seven papers from the 41st Wordsworth Summer Conference. In this selection of twelve specially chosen Lectures and Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Heather Glen writes on 'We are Seven' in the context of population studies in the 1790s, Judith W. Page on Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth, Anthony Harding on Wordswortyh, Coleridge and the Reading Public, Pamela Woof and Suzanne Stewart on Dorothy Wordsworth's writing, Peter Swaab on Sara Coleridge as a Wordsworth critic, Heidi Thomson on Wordworth and Auden, Judyta Frodyma on Bishop Lowth and 'Home at Grasmere', Stacey McDowell on Keats and Indolence, Catherine Redford on 'The Last Man' and Romantic Archaeology, Paul Whickman on Shelley's revisions of 'Laon and Cythna', and Jason Goldsmith on 'picturesque travel, or viewing landscape by painting it. The final essay includes twelve original landscapes, mostly in colour.


Jane Austen and Comedy

Jane Austen and Comedy

Author: Erin Goss

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-04-26

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1684480779

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In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Ultimately, Jane Austen and Comedy invites its reader to take seriously Austen's production of laughter and to keep laughing nonetheless.


Sweet Science

Sweet Science

Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 022645858X

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Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.