Romantic Fiat

Romantic Fiat
Author: E. Lindstrom
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230299415

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
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192599666

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
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2024-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487556063

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
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0823271056

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
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611483948

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
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004400060

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
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823299813

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
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2012-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847602363

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
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2019-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1684480779

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.

Poetics and the Gift

Poetics and the Gift
Author: Adam R. Rosenthal
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release:
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474488404

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida’s writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida’s work in Given Time and ‘Economimesis’, Rosenthal offers a novel account of ‘gift poetics’ and a new understanding of what makes poetry ‘poetry’.