Romantic Conception Research Articles

Crossroads and Barriers on the Roman Border: Institutional Authority, Roman Heritage and the “Đerdap” Projects

Although “the archaeological research in the Đerdap area represents the most important crossroad in Serbian archaeology” (Bikić i Šarić 2017, 67), the role of the two large research projects Đerdap I and II in the development of the discipline and the local archaeological community remains to be thoroughly reconsidered. In search for the answer whether the vast corpus of archaeological material and information gained in the course of these projects influenced the shift in interpretation of the Roman past and in presentation of the Roman frontier on the Danube, the paper presents certain scientific and research aspects and the consequences of the projects for the interpretive framework of the Roman period.
 It may be expected that, just as the fieldwork itself was a large opportunity for professional training and growing, the huge amount of information on the Roman border collected during the projects became a constant source for further consideration and disciplinary growth. The innovations introduced – multi-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, preventive conservation and integral protection of heritage – foreshadowed the space for testing of ideas. However, the archaeological record of the Roman period, approached from the culture-historical point of view, dominant at the time, is still principally interpreted according to the concepts formed in 19th century and significantly reconsidered over the last couple of decades. The majority of the recovered material is not published yet, the limited access to the “finds in boxes” obliges current researchers to work on the base of available publications, and the confidence in “discoveries” induces the transfer of ideas of original researchers without further reconsideration. The abandonment of the concept of Romanization is slow, mainly due to the institutional “keepers”, as illustrated by chosen examples, e.g. the monograph Vivere Militare est. From Populus to Emperors – living on the Frontier (Golubović, Mrđić 2018) and the exhibition Roman Limes and Cities in Serbia, organized on the occasion of the 24th International Limes-Congress, as well as the new permanent display of the National Museum, opened in 2018. It may be concluded that the constant affirmation of institutional authority, where the archaeological heritage of the Roman frontier acts as an academic symbolic capital, is more important than multivocal interpretation and presentation.

Thoreau’s luminous Homer in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

AbstractHenry David Thoreau’s relationship to Greek literature, and Homer’s Iliad in particular, is more often remarked than analysed. This article argues that Thoreau’s engagement with Homer in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, proves central to the themes of that work highlighted by critics as well as its less-studied formal hybrid of poetry and prose. I show that Thoreau constructs Homer as the poetic ideal in which the perennially renewed life of the natural world becomes accessible to human beings caught in the fatal and unidirectional movement of historical time. Thoreau’s ideas here may track Romantic conceptions of Homer and Greek literature more generally, but Thoreau turns contemporary uncertainty around the person of Homer into reflection on the relationship between personal experience and literary expression of ‘living nature’. This turns out to structure a larger dichotomy between poetry and prose, one in which Thoreau associates the latter with authentic experience and self-expression of an individual human life. In A Week’s engagement with Homer, then, we see Thoreau negotiating not only some core concerns of his writing but also his evolution from aspiring poet to author of the works in prose that ultimately define his career.

Translation studies: what’s in a name?

ABSTRACT This contribution starts from the observation that translation and translation studies (TS) seem to be perceived in a more vocational way than adjacent practices and disciplines. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, digitization and transmedial production led to a diversification of text-modifying and text-adapting practices, which have also affected the romantic concepts of authorship as well as the dominance of the aesthetics of opposition. A strong tendency within TS is already including these new developments and practices in research, and as such broadening the scope and the object of the discipline. However, there is also a tendency opposing this expansion and advocating the narrower object exclusively linked to the traditional practices of translating and interpreting proper. The name discussion about the discipline has been ongoing for a long time, but is now put in a different perspective due to these societal and disciplinary changes and relations.

Elemental Connections: Concinnity’s Romantic Aftermath

ABSTRACT This essay considers the conceptual aftermath of concinnitas—roughly, an agreeable interplay of parts—from the point of view of Early German Romanticism. In the Renaissance, concinnitas plays a central role in Leon Battista Alberti’s architectural writings due to its ability to masterfully connect and compose other essential elements, such as number, outline, and position. At that time, concinnitas also served other discourses beyond architecture, including rhetoric and music, where the concept of harmony is closely linked to concinnitas. From the perspective of German Romantic aesthetics, it seems logical that such a concept, with its ability to move easily among various aesthetic discourses and to navigate between parts and the whole, would be of particular interest. This essay argues that the Romantic concepts of Ebenmaß and Architektonik offer the most logical connections to Alberti’s theory of concinnity. With reference to Novalis’s encyclopedia project and his novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, I suggest that reflection on concinnity has something special to offer a discussion of Romantic elements: a heightened awareness of materiality in the midst of conceptual abstractions. As a guiding concept that becomes embodied in various ways in Romantic thinking, concinnity might also become a valuable heuristic tool for Romanticist scholars.

Personality as a subject of creation in the concepts of Novalis and F. Schlegel

The subject of this research is the doctrine of personality in philosophy of the early German romanticism. As the main source of establishment of the romantic concept of personality, the author examines I. Kant’s doctrine of the genius nature of creation. Detailed analysis is conducted on the artistic-philosophical fragments of Novalis and F. Schlegel, in which the concept of personality as a subject of creation is described most vividly. The article substantiates the fundamental significance of the concept of personality of all elements of the philosophy of romanticism, namely for the romanticists’ theory of understanding. The author analyzes not only the philosophical research on romanticism, but also literary, culturological, and religious publications on the topic. The article systematically substantiates the position, according to which creation in the philosophy of romanticism manifests as a universal substance of human spirit, which finds individual reflection in each person, and becomes the foundation for his growth and knowledge. The peculiarity of semantic theory of creative personality consists in the fact that in cannot be exhaustively cognized by the rational means; only artistic-aesthetic and religious consciousness allows approximating to comprehension of the nature of creation.

THE DEMONIC VITALISM OF THE FEMME FATALE AS A TRAGIC EXPRESSION OF REBELLION – KAP ŠPANSKE KRVI (A DROP OF SPANISH BLOOD) BY MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

This paper points to the exceptional place of the novel Kap španske krvi (A Drop of Spanish Blood, 1932) in the literary work of Miloš Crnjanski and Serbian literature of the 20th century. The novel is overpowered by other great literary pieces by Crnjanski Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (The Journal of Čarnojević), Seobe (Migrations), Druga knjiga Seoba (Other books of Migrations), Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London). Nevertheless, it is interpreted as the first Serbian novel in which the model of a fatal woman is activated and, in the era of modernism, revitalizes the romantic concept of femme fatale.

열린 체계의 토대로서의 ‘단편’ 형식 - 독일 초기낭만주의 ‘단편’ 개념에 대한 소고

열린 체계의 토대로서의 ‘단편’ 형식 - 독일 초기낭만주의 ‘단편’ 개념에 대한 소고

ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННЫЙ ДЕТСКИЙ ПОРТРЕТ ПЕРВОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XIX ВЕКА: РОМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ ОБРАЗЫ АНГЕЛА, «БЛАГОРОДНОГО ДИКАРЯ» И ГЕРОЯ

The article considers the children's portrait in Russian painting of the first third of the XIX century on the example of the works of O.A. Kiprensky, K.P. Bryullov, V.G. Varnek, V.A. Tropinin, A.G. Venetsianov and other portraitists of that time. The author identifies the most common “types” or variants of children's images in portraits, namely: children-angels, “noble savages”, children-heroes and “exemplary children”. The emergence of these “formulas of representation” is associated with the development of the so-called romantic concept of childhood, which assumes, in comparison with the previous era of “little adults”, a special attitude to the children's world as a lost ideal, a “Golden age” and programs for the future. The publication traces how the development of the genre and its imagery was affected by the actualization of romanticism trends in the visual arts of that time.

И. С. Тургенев и романтическая концепция У. Шекспира

И. С. Тургенев и романтическая концепция У. Шекспира

George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove

Reviewed by: George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination by Colin Manlove Erin Sheley (bio) George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. By Colin Manlove. Cascade Books, 2019. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined a literary "symbol" as "characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General" (30). This taxonomic approach to a particular tool of the imagination echoes throughout Colin Manlove's new monograph George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. It is hard to imagine a comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Victorian cleric's lifelong interest in the imagination that does not compare it to Coleridge's, whose Romantic conception of the creative imagination opened the nineteenth century. Indeed, a major thread in Manlove's argument distinguishes MacDonald's version of the imagination from Coleridge's: "Where Coleridge emphasizes the power of the imagination in re-making the world outside it, MacDonald sees it as seeking out something already given" (121). Specifically, Manlove argues, the belief that "God actually lives in the imagination of man and is the author of man's creativity is perhaps the most striking feature of MacDonald's thought" (6). Starting from this premise, Manlove offers a comprehensive classification of the functions of the divine imagination in all of MacDonald's major children's fantasy work, where, he argues, it operates both within and upon both the external world and the internal self. Manlove's project is descriptive, in the sense that he never interrogates MacDonald's own core assumptions or their broader social implications, but richly and rigorously so, offering a useful intellectual framework in which to understand the author's widely varied and often mysterious work. While MacDonald's evocative work has attracted a wealth of critical attention from notable scholars including U. C. Knoepflmacher and Roderick McGillis, much of the existing scholarship has been article- or chapter-length and focused on particular aspects of MacDonald's myth-making in certain stories, within the broader context of the Victorian fairy tale. There have been surprisingly few recent, book-length works on MacDonald (the most recent being Daniel Gabelman's 2013 George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairy Tale Levity). Thus Manlove's sustained treatment of the full body of the author's work for children is a welcome addition. In his first chapter, Manlove takes up MacDonald's short stories as a group in order to show how they represent a range of "types of the imagination" (14). In Manlove's system of classification, MacDonald shows the imagination operating in a range of modes, some good and some bad: as fancy, delusion, perversion, creation, spiritual insight, and vision (23). Each of the following chapters focuses on one of MacDonald's longer children's works and demonstrates one of the [End Page 182] operations of the specifically divine imagination that Manlove identifies. For Manlove, At the Back of the North Wind (1870) depicts the operation of the divine imagination within the world, while The Princess and the Goblin (1872) shows how it functions within the individual self. Symmetrically, Manlove argues, in The Wise Woman (1875) MacDonald shows how the imagination mobilizes God's creative powers against the individual self and, in The Princess and Curdie (1882), against the world. While this structure sometimes feels a bit too tidy, for the most part Manlove avoids the pitfall of subordinating research to argument. Indeed, despite the author's obvious intratextual interest in tracing MacDonald's theological positions, his argument is meticulously well situated within both the immediate context of nineteenth-century fairy tale writing and in the longer historical trajectory of imaginative English literature going back to Spenser and Shakespeare. (His comparison of Spenser's Una and Duessa to MacDonald's ageless wise women and their flawed pupils is particularly useful in illustrating the proposed distinction between visionary and delusional imagination in the latter texts.) Indeed, some of this book's most valuable contributions occur in the specific readings that Manlove offers in service of his broader argument. For example, he notes the relationship between objectivity and divine imagination in MacDonald's short stories...

Una poética de las ruinas: el viaje en busca de la España medieval de Frédéric Ozanam

In Un pèlerinage au pays du Cid, Fréderic Ozanam depicts his journey of 1852 through Spanish lands. It records both his personal experience and the reconstruction of different discourses which intervened as well, such as historical, literary and legendary references, especially those linked to the Middle Age and perceived according to the ro-mantic conception of the time. The aim of this paper is not only to establish its categorisa-tion within the travel speeches by analyzing its textual configuration, but also to study its most striking aspects: the isotopies and intertexts. This approach will enable the recon-struction of the author's cultural imaginary, his horizon of expectations, the function of the isotopies and intertexts in the discursive framework as well as the overall purpose of the book.

Browning’s Metaforms: Transformation and the Work of the Artist in The Ring and the Book

Browning’s Metaforms: Transformation and the Work of the Artist in The Ring and the Book Caitlin Crandell (bio) Of bodies turned to other forms I tell —Ovid, Metamorphoses So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms —Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book As Guido prepares to be beheaded near the close of his second monologue in The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), he considers punishments alternative to the execution called for by the Pope. In place of his death sentence Guido imagines a more mythical meting out of justice: no punishment, no painChildish, preposterous, impossible,But some such fate as Ovid would foresee,—Byblis in fluvium, let the weak soul endIn water, sed Lycaon in lupum, butThe strong become a wolf for evermore!1 This fantasy builds itself on a logic that subverts the Roman conception of justice: rather than punish the violent bloodlust that Count Guido Franceschini identifies in himself—a characteristic branded as animalistic, inhuman—this Ovidian fate would celebrate and confirm that trait. In this alternative ethics, wolfish people are not to be cured of or punished for their wolfishness but rather metamorphosed into the shape that best expresses that feature. If you can’t take the wolf out of the man, then you can take the man out of the wolf, Guido supposes: [End Page 237] Let me turn wolf, be whole, and sate, for once,—Wallow in what is now a wolfishnessCoerced too much by the humanityThat’s half of me as well! Grow out of man,Glut the wolf-nature,—what remains but growInto the man again, be man indeedAnd all man? Do I ring the changes right? (XI: 2056–2062) There is a certain fitting quality that accompanies this shift from split identity to completeness: Guido is not only whole but “sate[d], for once” in becoming wolf. However, the energy of unfulfilled desire, coded here as hunger, quickly overextends itself into the exuberant indulgence of wallowing and glutting. To become a wolf, in these terms, is to release oneself from the strictures and rules of human activity and to relish the freedom of extreme behavior. This passage, as such, links the metaphorical transformation of man to wolf with a complex and subtle verbal shift that embodies the liberation of a ravenous being. Only after a moment of contemplation does it become clear that Guido envisions two alternatives of material form that articulate two different verdicts on his murderous behavior.2The Roman law finds him inhuman and determines to unman him through beheading: the execution corrects for a disjuncture between material form (man) and spiritual character (wolf), making incomplete the human body that lacks in human morality. Guido’s wish to be transformed into a wolf, conversely, removes the human vestiges within him and thereby exempts him from the rule of human law, leaving the insatiable beast to glut itself with animal autonomy. This Ovidian vision of transformation should strike the reader of The Ring and the Book as familiar. Guido’s description of his half-mannish, half-wolfish nature—a split medium striving to “be whole”—fits precisely the pattern set out in the opening of the poem: it formulates a figure of distinct but melded halves that expresses the work’s combinate form. Indeed, as he does throughout the poem, Browning hides a hint in plain sight with Guido’s question whether he “ring[s] the changes right.” The primary symbol of the entire work, Browning’s “ring-thing” (I: 17), is itself a product of halves—an alloy of gold and wax, or fact and fiction—that finds completeness through a process of transformation: There’s one trick(Craftsmen instruct me) one approved deviceAnd but one, fits such slivers of pure gold [End Page 238] As this was,—such mere oozings from the mine,. . .To bear the file’s tooth and the hammer’s tap. . .Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear.That trick is this: the artificer melts up waxWith honey, so to speak; he mingles goldWith gold’s alloy, and, duly tempering both,Effects a manageable mass (I: 8–21...

СТИХ И ДРАМА В ТЕКСТЕ И. М. ГОГОЛЕВА «СВЯЩЕННЫЙ УДЕЛ»

Within the framework of the “poet’s drama” problem, the paper identifies the peculiarities of verse and dramaturgic elements in I. M. Gogolev’s drama “The Sacred Land”. Conditionally poetic interpretation of a historical subject determines style and genre peculiarities of the text, which combines the elements of different styles and genres. I. M. Gogolev’s drama “The Sacred Land” is considered as a marginal text combining verse and dramaturgic elements and representing the romantic conception of the poet’s world perception and formal features of a verse. The text analysis indicates the dominance of the lyrical element: figurativeness and metaphoricity of the style, conditionality and generality of images and, as a result, the slow story development, personages’ statuary essence and inner statics.

Hungarian Sculpture of the Late Twentieth Century. At the Intersection of Romanticism and Pop Art

Developing intensively and in its own way throughout the 20th century, Hungarian sculpture has gained recognition as one of the leading European schools. Much in its creative image was determined between the two world wars when romantic tonality, combining dynamic activity and plastic flexibility, became a high priority. Romantic pantheism made itself felt in the artistic works of the Hungarians, successfullyshown at the All-Union Art Exhibition in Moscow in 1957-1958. The appeal to the motives and forms of nature enriched the human modulus of Hungarian sculpture.The period between 1960-1970 is its most fruitful time. The combination of romantic concepts and themes with object textures and aesthetics of simplicity, inherent in pop art, among the masters of the older generation, Imre Varga and Erzsébet Schaár who were recognized in Europe, was the biggest event among the variants of its creative movement. Imre Varga’s evolution in this direction, from grotesque-naturalistic publicism to the use of pop art techniques as a means of the dramatic theatricalization of human life and history, is illustrated in the article. Varga developed a synthesis of the pop art-inspired landscape and romantic portrait in the best monuments of these decades. In Erzsébet Schaár’s art, the objective world more than once turned into an artistic metaphor of independent significance. However, for her, the most important meeting of romanticism and pop art happened, the same as for Varga, in the search for synthesis and the creation of an ensemble. Her Street, which is exhibited in the city of Pecs, is perceived as a combination of symbolic figures and environmental objects, imbued with the idea of infinity of the world.

Grobund for nationalisme. En manual til beskæringen af danskhedsgevæksten

In this article, I demonstrate that usages of “growth” generally indicate two, divergent understandings of the term. While the one, which has roots in the philosophy of natural history, attempts to consolidate a notion of growth meant to mobilise collective, national, and historical values, the other identifies the notion of growth with its industrial, capitalist, and transnational associations, whereby the term becomes analogous with global expansion and unlimited freedom of movement. It is important to acknowledge that rhetorical usages of “growth” are not exclusive to the discourse of neoliberal capitalism, particularly as my primary purpose is to marshal an analysis of political, art-historical, and cultural-historical discourses in order to expose the assumptions that underpin the national conception of growth and the persistence of such constructions. I find, in other words, that there is often something veiled in references to growth in Denmark: an implicative subtext that subtly attaches itself to biology, the soil, and the landscape, and results in forceful national allegories and symbols. Similarly, it is interesting to observe how the expansive emergence of industrialisation critically challenged and subsumed the Romantic conception of growth, such that the term eventually had little reference beyond business and economics. In contrast, this article considers the symbolic value of the forest and the physiology of trees for the construction of a collective, Danish, national identity; through this lens, the article focuses on the organic/biological aspect of growth and sheds new light on its implementation in art and cultural life in Denmark.

An Old Law for a New Literature: Authors, Publishers and the Early Years of the Victorian Copyright Act 1869

This article analyses the early years of the operation of copyright legislation in the colony of Victoria, Australia. The Copyright Act 1869 (Vic) was introduced into a thriving but volatile colonial literary marketplace. The law was based almost wholly on the UK law at the time, existing in a very different environment. This article notes that despite the rhetoric of the protection of the right of authors as an aim of the law, the effect was something quite different. We examine the use of copyright by some key players in that colonial market, both publishers and authors. That analysis reveals that the prophetic words of George Higinbotham, that the law was not for the protection of the author, but the publisher, can be demonstrated to be true. This is evident both in the implementation of the law itself and in a number of inconsistencies in its operation. We conclude that, despite public and parliamentary rhetoric drawing on the romantic conception of the author as creator, the law’s conception of the author as proprietor offered little protection to local Australian authors writing new literature for a new country.

Persons as ‘Symbols’ and ‘Carriers’: Two Modes of Imagining the Individual and Society in the Nineteenth Century

In his mature systematic writings, Karl Marx pointedly restricted the discussion of individuals as such. Instead of discussing individual characters, motivations, or desires, Marx treats people as ‘carriers’ ( Träger) of social relations. This essay contrasts this functional or structural approach to the Romantic socialism of Pierre Leroux, who conceptualized the individual in the symbolic terms defined by Romantic aesthetics. Though Marx’s reduction of individuals to their social function played a valuable role in the development of his analysis of political economy, it has produced controversy across many decades and presented problems for the political project defined by Marxism. The Romantic conception of a symbolic intersection between the individual and society does not present a fully satisfying alternative to Marx, but this essay argues that it provides an important corrective to the conception of persons as carriers of social relations.

Durch die Blume gesagt. Erotische Blumenmetaphorik in romantischer Lyrik: Stagnelius, Wergeland und Aarestrup

Abstract Likening females to flowers is not a groundbreaking poetical strategy. However, romantic poetry seems to deal with this well-known metaphor in a particularly expressive way. In this paper, three poems by three different romantic authors — Erik Johan Stagnelius, Henrik Wergeland, and Emil Aarestrup — are analyzed with regard to their use of metaphors merging floral and erotic subjects, particularly in viewing women as flowers. The three chosen poems highlight the effectiveness of metaphorical operations in the context of romantic conceptions of unity. They are marked by a strong metalinguistic awareness in that they are reflective of their uses of metaphorical language in an ironic and playful manner that reveals different shifts of meaning. More precisely, the metaphors serve to illuminate alternative layers of meaning related to the romantic language: In the end, it is language that brings about the erotic relationship, language that does not merely describe but actually shapes the beloved one.

The Romanticism of Political Science

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the relationship between modern political science and Romanticism. This is done by using Carl Schmitt’s conception of political romanticism and proposing some corrections to it. Schmitt failed to notice important similarities between the scientific concept of causa and the romantic concept of occasio. Modern political science is based on the same assumptions as the modern art of the romantic tradition. The researches of political science are conditioned by an unpolitical relationship with reality.

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACTIn her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.