Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, HistoryStanford University Press, 2000 - 227 oldal Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of ?imagination in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological?an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical?a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations. The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins's odes figure Scotland as the site of a ?superstitious poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind's projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts. Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt's political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt's enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics. The final sections of the book engage Shelley's complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets ?unacknowledged legislators, suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly ?historical action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between ?superstition, ?imagination, and ?history in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism. |
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4. oldal
... merely to " critique " the posi- tion of imagination . Here , one must distinguish — it only provision- ally — what one might call its structural from its psychological func- tion : imagination as the ground , however problematic , for ...
... merely to " critique " the posi- tion of imagination . Here , one must distinguish — it only provision- ally — what one might call its structural from its psychological func- tion : imagination as the ground , however problematic , for ...
5. oldal
... merely as shorthand for ways in which the aesthetic , in its very claim to a privileged autonomy , raises the specter of the " whole " —of context , of history , of being itself — and displays it in all its varied com- and im ...
... merely as shorthand for ways in which the aesthetic , in its very claim to a privileged autonomy , raises the specter of the " whole " —of context , of history , of being itself — and displays it in all its varied com- and im ...
6. oldal
... merely a new and better critical tool , not least because the difference between pathos and ethos is scarcely absolute.20 Historicity never stands free of historical repre- sentations . Act and argument , like truth and error ...
... merely a new and better critical tool , not least because the difference between pathos and ethos is scarcely absolute.20 Historicity never stands free of historical repre- sentations . Act and argument , like truth and error ...
7. oldal
... merely to words on a page — to a particular poem or book . This ambiguity , too , is often productive . In recent scholarship , particularly , it has been the source of much that is compelling in the discourses of deconstruction and ...
... merely to words on a page — to a particular poem or book . This ambiguity , too , is often productive . In recent scholarship , particularly , it has been the source of much that is compelling in the discourses of deconstruction and ...
8. oldal
... merely an aftereffect of predetermined identities . It is , so to speak , a giving of experience ( re ) presented as its given . The litany of Romanticism's oppositional topoi — self and other , subject and object , mind and na- ture ...
... merely an aftereffect of predetermined identities . It is , so to speak , a giving of experience ( re ) presented as its given . The litany of Romanticism's oppositional topoi — self and other , subject and object , mind and na- ture ...
Gyakori szavak és kifejezések
action aesthetic allegory appears argument articulation Benjamin canto catachresis chapter claims Collins Collins's poetry consciousness context critical critique Defence of Poetry Derrida didacticism différance difference discourse disinterest edited effect emphasis England English Enlightenment Essay ethical evil example Fancy feel figure future Harold Bloom Historicism human ideal identity ideology imagination implications insofar interest interpretation Jacques Derrida language Levinas linguistic literal literary literature Lycidas means mediate mind Mont Blanc moral morning star narrative nation never object once original Oxford passage past Percy Bysshe Shelley philosophical poem poet poetic political position possibility present prose Punishment of Death question quoted readers reading reference referential reflection remains Revolt of Islam rhetoric Romantic Romanticism Scotland Scottish self-interest sense Shelley Shelley's spirit structure superstition temporal thematic things Thomas Love Peacock thou thought tion traces translated trope turn University Press Walter Benjamin William Hazlitt words writing