Middling Romanticism

Middling Romanticism
Author: Zachary Sng
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823288420

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies
Author: Joel Faflak
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2016-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119129613

The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism. Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years

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.

Literary Conclusions

Literary Conclusions
Author: Oliver Simons
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810144816

Endings are not just singular moments in time but the outcomes of a process. And whatever a book’s conclusion, its form has a history. Literary Conclusions presents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analyzing essential works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts. Simons examines the interrelations of Lessing’s literary endings with modes of logical conclusion; he highlights how Goethe’s narrative closures are forestalled by an uncontrollable vital force that was discussed in the sciences of the time; and he reveals that Kleist conceived of literary genres themselves as forms of reasoning. Kleist’s endings, Simons demonstrates, mark the beginning of modernism. Through close readings of these authors and supplemental analyses of works by Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he crafts an elegant theory of conclusions that revises established histories of literary genres and forms.

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education
Author: Clemens Spahr
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2022-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793649553

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education focuses on three Romantic educational genres and their institutional and media contexts: the conversation, literary journalism, and the public lecture. The genres discussed in this book illustrate the ways in which the Transcendentalists engaged nineteenthcentury media and educational institutions in order to fully realize their projects. The book also charts the development from the semi-public conversational platforms such as Alcott’s Temple School and Fuller’s conversations for women in the 1830s to the increasingly public periodical culture and lecture platforms of the 1840s and the early 1850s. This expansion caused a reconsideration of the meaning and function of Romanticism.

The Location of Experience

The Location of Experience
Author: Adela Pinch
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1531508626

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside? The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other. Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

Infectious Liberty

Infectious Liberty
Author: Robert Mitchell
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823294617

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of. Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

On the Horizon of World Literature

On the Horizon of World Literature
Author: Emily Sun
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823294811

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Lessons of Romanticism

Lessons of Romanticism
Author: Thomas Pfau
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1998
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780822320913

Explores how the Romantic period gave birth to a seductive cognitive cultural program that retains far reaching implications for contemporary views on individuality and relationships between the individual and larger groups of identification. Established

Shibboleth

Shibboleth
Author: Marc Redfield
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823289087

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. This book interprets the episode in Judges together with Celan’s poems and Jacques Derrida’s reading of them, as well as passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.