The Familiar Essay, Romantic Affect and Metropolitan Culture

The Familiar Essay, Romantic Affect and Metropolitan Culture

Author: Simon Peter Hull

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1527512339

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Through close readings of diverse examples by Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Irving and Poe, this book argues that the familiar essay in the Romantic period embodies a quintessentially metropolitan mode of affect. The generic traits of the essay—astuteness of observation, an ambulatory or paratactic movement of thought, and an urbane tone of wry or ironic humour—all predispose it to the expression of a detached, non-pathological state of mind. This is a mind conditioned by the quickened pace, assorted humanity, and plenitude of spectacle which characterise urban and urbanised life. In making a valuable, genre-based contribution to scholarship on the importance to Romantic studies of the city and metropolitan culture, the traditional concept of Romantic affect is reassessed. The book proposes a more complex and varied model than the simple binary one of a “feeling” reaction to Enlightenment “reason.” Partly enacted within its own formal parameters and partly through its disruptive and genre-transcending progeny, the essayistic figure, the familiar essay articulates a blithe and, at times, shocking and provocative discourse of “un-affect,” or a strategically and often satirical callousness. Therefore, the overall concept of affect in this period needs to be understood not as a unified entity opposed to Enlightenment reason, but a dialogue between concurrent, opposing modes, played out against a dichotomized geo-cultural landscape of the country and the city. Essayistic un-affect emerges, in the end, as an apolitical phenomenon, a primary vehicle for the essayist’s inherent scepticism, sometimes enabling outright ridicule and, at other times, a tentative questioning or probing of both orthodox thought and emerging ideas: from the rarefied liberalist sensibility of the Lake poets, to the hubristic vanity of the colonial adventurer, and from the allure of hedonistic, Old World decadence to the proscriptive strictures of moralistic art.


Encyclopedia of the Essay

Encyclopedia of the Essay

Author: Tracy Chevalier

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 1032

ISBN-13: 1135314101

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies


Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Author: Charles Martindale

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1108875696

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This first collected discussion of Pater's significance for English literary criticism reveals his importance in shaping the principles of Modernist criticism and comprehensively contextualises his work. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.


At Large and at Small

At Large and at Small

Author: Anne Fadiman

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2008-11-06

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0141903694

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literary delights. This is the perfect book for life's ardent obsessives.


The Economy of Literary Form

The Economy of Literary Form

Author: Lee Erickson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780801863585

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Erickson analyzes the effects of a changing market on the relative cultural status of literary forms. Topics include the impact of technological changes in printing on English poetry; ideological focus and the market for the essay; and marketing the novel, 1820-1850."--"Book News, Inc., " Portland, Oregon. (Literary Criticism)