Romanticism's Other Minds


Book Description

Reassesses early negotiations between poetry and the sciences, demonstrating how poetry represents the staging ground for a surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind.




The Two Romanticisms and other essays


Book Description

The Romantic period is the most appealing but also the most confusing period of English literature for the student. Crucially, this book distinguishes between 'the Romantic' as modern critics use the term and 'the romantic' as it was used during the period itself. The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays is a collection of critical essays on Romanticism and select Romantic texts, designed to help teachers and students to make sense of the period as a whole and of the poems and novels that appear most frequently on school and university curricula. Each chapter offers a self-contained reading of a different canonical work while engaging with broader themes. Through close readings of Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, Professor Christie explores the complexities of the Romantic period and offers fresh insights into pivotal Romantic texts.




Mind's World


Book Description

Winner of the 2009 International Conference on Romanticism's Jean-Pierre Barricelli Award for the best book in Romanticism studies As the mental faculty that mediates between self and world, mind and body, the senses and the intellect, imagination is indispensable for modern models of subjectivity. From René Descartes's Meditations to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, to think about the subject necessarily means to address the problem of imagination. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg (Novalis) and Coleridge, and with a sustained return to the origins of the discourse about imagination in Greek antiquity, Alexander Schlutz demonstrates that neither the unity of the subject itself, nor the unity of the philosophical systems that are based on it, can be conceptualized without recourse to imagination. Yet, philosophers like Descartes and Kant must deny imagination any such foundational role because of its dangerous connection to the body, the senses and the unruly passions, which threatens the desired autonomy of the rational subject. The modern subject is simultaneously dependent upon and constructed in opposition to imagination, and the resulting ambivalence about the faculty is one of the fundamental conditions of modern models of subjectivity. Schlutz's readings of the Romantic poet-philosophers Coleridge and Hardenberg highlight that also their texts are not free of fears about the faculty's disruptive potential and its connection to the body. While imagination is now openly enlisted to produce the aesthetic unity of subjectivity, it still threatens to unravel and destroy a subject that needs to keep the body and its desires at bay in order to secure its rational and moral autonomy. The dark abyss of a self not in control of its thoughts, feelings, and desires is not overcome by the philosophical glorification of the subject's powers of imagination.




British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind


Book Description

In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Richardson breaks new ground in two fields, revealing a significant and undervalued facet of British Romanticism while demonstrating the 'Romantic' character of early neuroscience. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct and intuition, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the era, take on unsuspected valences that transform conventional accounts of Romantic cultural history. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.




The Roots of Romanticism


Book Description

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".




The Cast of Consciousness


Book Description

The contributors to this volume represent acknowledged experts in the field as well as a number of promising young scholars. They provide a thorough examination of how Romantic authors grappled with the problem of describing the connections between consciousness, unconsciousness, and language in their endeavor to capture this interplay in their art. As this collection bears witness, the Romantics sought to discard old ideas about language and literature and to mold new forms in their search to recover, in both literature and life, the sense of human possiblity. The essays, while strikingly diverse in topic and approach, explore this broad issue and come to a surprisingly similar conclusion: for Romantic writers, genuine consciousness, whatever it might imply about self-awareness, not only made it possible for an individual to affiliate with something outside himself, but even made such bonding necessary.




The Persistence of Romanticism


Book Description

This volume, first published in 2001, argues that Romantic thought remains central to both artistic work and philosophical understanding.




Romantic Poetry


Book Description

This anthology fills the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date collection of the most important contemporary writings on the English romantic poets. During the 1980s, many theoretical innovations in literary study swept academic criticism. Many of these approaches--from deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist perspectives--used romantic texts as primary examples and altered radically the ways in which we read. Other major changes have occurred in textual studies, dramatically transforming the works of these poets. The world of English romantic poetry has certainly changed, and Romantic Poetry keeps pace with those changes. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff have organized the book by poet--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats--and have included essays representative of key critical approaches to each poet's work. In addition to their excellent general introduction, the editors have provided brief, helpful forewords to each essay, showing how it reflects current approaches to its subject. The book also has an extensive bibliography sure to serve as an important research aid. Students on all levels will find this book invaluable.




Stranger Cities: Australian Creation and the Ambidextrous Mind, a Profile of Portal Modernity


Book Description

Stranger Cities explores the metaphysics of Australian society and the clash between its competing strands of romantic culture and classic civilization. The social expression, artistic resonance, economic significance, civic character, historic phases, mythic representations, creative antinomies, and imaginative contribution of these metaphysical fundamentals form the background of Australia’s distinctive urban civilization with its bustling stranger populations, ocean-facing portal cities, revealing art and architecture, and cyclical worlds of markets and industries, war and peace. Murphy portrays a classic eudemonic society whose dominant ethos of phlegmatic happiness vies with a subsidiary current of melancholic and choleric romanticism.




The Romantic Absolute


Book Description

The absolute was one of the most significant philosophical concepts in the early nineteenth century, particularly for the German romantics. Its exact meaning and its role within philosophical romanticism remain, however, a highly contested topic among contemporary scholars. In The Romantic Absolute, Dalia Nassar offers an illuminating new assessment of the romantics and their understanding of the absolute. In doing so, she fills an important gap in the history of philosophy, especially with respect to the crucial period between Kant and Hegel. Scholars today interpret philosophical romanticism along two competing lines: one emphasizes the romantics’ concern with epistemology, the other their concern with metaphysics. Through careful textual analysis and systematic reconstruction of the work of three major romantics—Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling—Nassar shows that neither interpretation is fully satisfying. Rather, she argues, one needs to approach the absolute from both perspectives. Rescuing these philosophers from frequent misunderstanding, and even dismissal, she articulates not only a new angle on the philosophical foundations of romanticism but on the meaning and significance of the notion of the absolute itself.