Romantic Palingenesis, or History from the Ashes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Palingenesis, or regeneration from decay, is variously invoked by eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century natural philosophy, psychology, mythography, and literature. Its currency derives from the Swiss scientist Charles Bonnet’s Palingénésie philosophique (1769), which conceives of natural history as repeated renewal after epochal catastrophes. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Über die seelenwanderung (1782) develops an idea of “natural palingenesis” as the internal “rebirth” of selfhood within memory despite physiological decay. Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s fragmentary magnum opus Essais de palingénésie sociale (1827–29) turned to political upheaval, locating the French Revolution within a process by which expiatory suffering gives birth to a new social order. Other writers looked back to alchemical experiments, which Robert Southey reviewed in Omniana (1812) under the heading “Spectral Flowers,” and still other writers explored the palingenetic properties of resurrected bodies and ghosts. In the light of this not altogether unified discourse, this article will consider the more discontented, skeptical strain within Shelley’s poetry, where beautiful idealisms of progressivist transformation do not entirely overcome the fact of death, decay, degeneration, and loss that is their substrata.