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. |
Részletek a könyvből
1 - 5 találat összesen 59 találatból.
. oldal
... 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 tadition . It considers , in par- ticular , how ...
... 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 tadition . It considers , in par- ticular , how ...
3. oldal
... political worlds from which it emerges and in which it takes place . This version of Romantic aesthetics , as one of the many " phantoms " of " ideol- ogy , " fails to take into account the place of aesthetics in arguments that are ...
... political worlds from which it emerges and in which it takes place . This version of Romantic aesthetics , as one of the many " phantoms " of " ideol- ogy , " fails to take into account the place of aesthetics in arguments that are ...
4. oldal
... politics ( the minatory slogan of Brecht and Benjamin ) may well provoke genuine and justified dis- comfort , but the all - too - comfortable suggestion that aesthetics is only political insofar as it forecloses politics misses the ...
... politics ( the minatory slogan of Brecht and Benjamin ) may well provoke genuine and justified dis- comfort , but the all - too - comfortable suggestion that aesthetics is only political insofar as it forecloses politics misses the ...
6. oldal
... politics , is , more often than not , experienced in Romanticism and the ( post ) modernity that is its heir as something of an impasse . As such , it provokes a range of pathos - ridden re- sponses.19 I can hardly claim that my ...
... politics , is , more often than not , experienced in Romanticism and the ( post ) modernity that is its heir as something of an impasse . As such , it provokes a range of pathos - ridden re- sponses.19 I can hardly claim that my ...
9. oldal
... political polemics , and journalism . These are not all literary in the increas- ingly narrow sense that the word has come to connote ; they do all partake of the Romantic discourse of imagination that articulates the uneasy passage ...
... political polemics , and journalism . These are not all literary in the increas- ingly narrow sense that the word has come to connote ; they do all partake of the Romantic discourse of imagination that articulates the uneasy passage ...
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