Dissenting Textualism: The Claims of Psychological Method in the Long Romantic Period

Abstract

Dissenting Textualism: The Claims of Psychological Method in the Long Romantic Period Frances Ferguson (bio) Frances Ferguson The Johns Hopkins University Frances Ferguson Frances Ferguson teaches at The Johns Hopkins University. She writes on the eighteenth century, Romanticism, and literary theory, and is currently working on a book on the thinking that gave rise to mass education. Footnotes 1. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979). 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter xiv. 3. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 5. 4. Jeremy Bentham, A Table of the Springs of Action in Deontology Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and The Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 12. 5. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003). 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973) xxiii. 7. The Nicene Creed affirms chat Christ is “of the same substance” as the Father and stresses “the reality of the Holy Spirit”; the Apostolic and Athanasian Creeds assert Christ’s divinity and the centrality of the Trinity to salvation. I here draw on the useful account provided in Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 45, n. 3. 8. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale UP, 1974); E. S. Shaffer, Kubla Khan and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975). I present three Dissenters–rather than one–in an effort to identify a general tendency rather than individual positions. Isabel Rivers provides a more nuanced and detailed account of various Dissenters’ positions and debates than I can hope to do. See in particular her Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. 9. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999) 75–81. 10. Iam Balfour has, more recently, addressed the genealogical development through which prophecy came to be ascribed to poets, and further develops the picture that Abrams and Shaffer present in noting Coleridge’s resistances to Herder’s account of the humanity of the authorship of the Bible. See his The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 106–7. 11. M. H. Abrams, National Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). 12. Both Shaffer and Ian Balfour follow Frei in seeing the German critical tradition as more robust than the British one, but their readings of Coleridge and Eliot bring out a line of thought similar to that of the German tradition. 13. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries and Manners (Colchester; W. Keymer, 1785) 1: 11. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale. 14. John Stuart Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F. R. Leavis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950) 138; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) 60. 15. In presenting Locke, Doddridge, and Priestley as central examples here, I am not making claims about all Dissenters but rather articulating tendencies that I take to capture the most important implications of their textual practices. Debates within Dissent were frequently as intense as they were between Dissent and Anglicanism, but I speak of Dissent as I speak of the novel, as a heuristic unity that enables us to chart important elements without pretending to capture the full diversity of either religious or literary practice. 16. See John Guillory, “Literary Capital: Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and the Vernacular Canon” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Properly (New York: Routledge, 1996) 389–410. Guillory's essay brings out the importance of the Dissenting academies in promulgating the vernacular–rather than Latin–in education. 17. Neil W. Hitchen, “The Politics of English Bible Translation in Georgian Britain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 9 (1999): 67–92. 18. Matthew Arnold, Culture...