Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822320916 ISBN 13: 9780822320913

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, Lessons of Romanticism strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology—in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context—ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies.
With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and pedagogical purposes of art exhibits in London, the materiality of late Romantic salon culture, the extracanonical status of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, and Romantic imagery in Beethoven’s music and letters, Lessons of Romanticism reveals the practices that were at the heart of European Romantic life. Focusing on the six decades from 1780 to 1832, this collection is arranged thematically around gender and genre, literacy, marginalization, canonmaking, and nationalist ideology. As Americanists join with specialists in German culture, as Austen is explored beside Beethoven, and as discussions on newly recovered women’s writings follow fresh discoveries in long-canonized texts, these interdisciplinary essays not only reflect the broad reach of contemporary scholarship but also point to the long-neglected intertextual and intercultural dynamics in the various and changing faces of Romanticism itself.

Contributors. Steven Bruhm, Miranda J. Burgess, Joel Faflak, David S. Ferris, William Galperin, Regina Hewitt, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, H. J. Jackson, Theresa M. Kelley, Greg Kucich, C. S. Matheson, Adela Pinch, Marc Redfield, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Marlon B. Ross, Maynard Solomon, Richard G. Swartz, Nanora Sweet, Joseph Viscomi, Karen A. Weisman, Susan I. Wolfson

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas Pfau is Associate Professor of English at Duke University.

Robert F. Gleckner is Professor of English at Duke University.

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""Lessons of Romanticism" offers new, creative, and stimulating material, both on the more localized front of the subject matter of the individual essays and more broadly on the wide, diverse, intertextual and intercultural landscape of Romantic studies generally. Every essay takes its subject in new directions."--Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Lessons of Romanticism

A Critical Companion

By Thomas Pfau, Robert F. Gleckner

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2091-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction. Reading beyond Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Varieties of Bildung in European Romanticism and Beyond, 
Romanticism, Bildung, and the Literary Absolute, 
The Inhibitions of Democracy on Romantic Political Thought: Thoreau's Democratic Individualism, 
Between Irony and Radicalism: The Other Way of a Romantic Education, 
Friendly Instruction: Coleridge and the Discipline of Sociology, 
Keats and the Aesthetics of Critical Knowledge; or, The Ideology of Studying Romanticism at the Present Time, 
Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation and the Challenge of Eco-Literacy, 
Postmodernism, Romanticism, and John Clare, 
Images and Institutions of Cultural Literacy in Romanticism, 
The Lessons of Swedenborg; or, The Origin of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 
Coleridge's Lessons in Transition: The "Logic" of the "Wildest Odes", 
Some Romantic Images in Beethoven, 
"Lorenzo's" Liverpool and "Corinne's" Coppet: The Italianate Salon and Romantic Education, 
Liberty, Connection, and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Movement of the Picturesque, 
The Royal Academy and the Annual Exhibition of the Viewing Public, 
Romantic Psychoanalysis: Keats, Identity, and "(The Fall of) Hyperion", 
"Their terrors came upon me tenfold": Literacy and Ghosts in John Clare's Autobiography, 
Gender, Sexuality, and the (Un)Romantic Canon, 
A Lesson in Romanticism: Gendering the Soul, 
What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?, 
Domesticating Gothic: Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, and National Romance, 
Learning What Hurts: Romanticism, Pedagogy, Violence, 
Reforming Byron's Narcissism, 
"This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings": Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Romanticism, Bildung, and the Literary Absolute

MARC REDFIELD

The notion of Romanticism has led a disputatious life ever since its uncertain beginnings in the Romantic era. In the first half of the twentieth century, as the term's use shifted slowly but irreversibly away from that of literary polemic and toward that of an academic term–away, that is, from overtly ethical and axiological battles and toward historical and hermeneutic ones–the famous debate between A. O. Lovejoy and René Wellek caused scholars to speculate whether Romanticism existed in a more than nominal fashion as a coherent entity. The subsequent institutional history awards the victory to Wellek, who claimed that it did, but the production and reproduction of Romanticism as an academic field does not in the end render Romanticism a less uncertain phenomenon. The difficulties it poses for the literary historian are well known. Romanticism is used to characterize diverse historical moments in national literatures and to privilege specific writers or movements at the expense of others; at the same time, as a style or "system of norms" (Wellek 2), it seems ensnared in recurring contradictions, with a mode that is variously utopian and despairing, naive and self-conscious, humanist (Abrams) and satanic (Praz). The larger significance of these literary and academic paradoxes revolves around their denoting, as Maurice Blanchot remarks, a Romanticism that has also stood for a "political investment," one with "extremely diverse vicissitudes, as [Romanticism] was at times claimed by the most reactionary regimes (that of Friedrich Wilhelm in 1840 and the literary theoreticians of Nazism), and at other times ... illuminated and understood as a demand for renovation" (163). If the term now primarily serves an academic institutional arrangement, it nonetheless comes burdened with enough cultural significance to pose the conundrum of our own historical identity.

For the difficulty Romanticism presents is not simply that of a contradictory entity, but rather that of a phenomenon that has to a great extent shaped our attempt to grasp it. Romanticism designates the historical emergence of a modern understanding of history, along with ideas of revolution, democracy, the nation and its literature, literature and its criticism, and the cultural and pedagogical institutions that convey and reproduce such ideas. Literary historians and critics know a particularly circular version of this predicament, which may help explain why polemics against Romanticism so visibly mark the literary-critical record: the embarrassment of indebtedness is all the more irksome when the very terms of one's polemic—an opposition, say, of romanticism to classicism—derive from the movement one wishes to castigate and escape. Not restricted to a preprofessional era, this double bind recurs persistently in contemporary academic criticism, sheltered though we now might be within a scholarly bureaucracy. The Romantics may no longer be undergoing chastisement of the sort meted out by Babbitt or Hulme, but Romanticism is still being accorded the treatment of an ideology available for debunking—a debunking that then is found to consist in the remarkably Romantic endeavor to "return poetry to a human form" (McGann 160). Yet an obscurity persists at the heart of these paradoxes. We have not gained much by claiming to be inside a Romanticism we cannot properly define, which may not, in fact, have an identity within which we could dwell. This obscurity is displayed in literary studies as a tension between literature and the Romantic aesthetic that defines literature as such. Texts that have seemed particularly Romantic—those of Shelley, for instance, or Rousseau or Schlegel—have in their long, curious history been judged at once irreducibly literary and yet unsatisfactory or flawed. More recently, academicians have had to confront Romanticism as the matrix of literary theory, whose various forms draw inspiration from the slippage between a text and its aesthetic or critical reception—from the fact, in other words, that literature seems able to mean both too much and too little to be reducible to the pleasure of an intuition, or to the stability of an intention or a well-wrought form. With Romanticism defining the terms of its own debate, we need to account for it as a phenomenon that not only calls itself into question, but also seems to slip away from its own standards and its own critical language, resulting in criticism that inhabits a constant, though usually only half-acknowledged, state of crisis.

The focus of this essay, an instance of critical crisis and its half-acknowledgment, is appropriate to the theme of this section: the status of the notion of the bildungsroman, or novel of education, in literary studies. The idea behind this genre is at once a commonplace and a minor embarrassment, and its vicissitudes replay in dramatically compressed form the paradoxes at work in the concept and history of Romanticism. Few critical terms, let alone German ones, have achieved comparable success, both within and without the academy; yet the moment one takes seriously the definitions and implications of the word "bildungsroman," it appears to lose most or all of its referential purchase. A bildungsroman ought to be a novel that represents and enacts...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822320916
• ISBN 13: 9780822320913
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 488
• Herausgeber: Pfau
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland