Romantic Discourse Research Articles

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge Jade Hagan Gavin Budge. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852. Houndsmills UK and New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. Viii + 296. Riding the wave of critical interest in spectrality following Derrida’s Specters of Marx (2003), Gavin Budge begins his study of the “spectral aspects” of nineteenth-century literature with the observation that “the majority of nineteenth-century books about spectres and related topics are by doctors” (1). Accordingly, Budge situates Romanticism’s much discussed interest in visionary experience—including religious visions, apparitions, and drug-induced hallucinations—within medical discourses of the period from 1789 to 1852. More specifically, Budge recovers the widespread cultural currency of John Brown’s medical theories, which understood all disease as a product of either excessive stimulation (asthenia) or insufficient stimulation (sthenia). This historical context allows Budge to recover the medical resonance of terms like “overstimulation” and “irritability,” and to explore how medical ideas about these conditions often coincided with philosophical and literary debates about the nature of perception and the danger of novel reading. This confluence of medical and literary-philosophical notions provides the foundation for Budge’s examination of the ambiguous relationship between bodily materiality and the immateriality of the mind that constitutes Romantic and Victorian interest in the “natural supernatural.” The aim of Budge’s study is threefold. First, Budge hopes to fill a gap in Romantic scholarship, which he claims has hitherto paid little attention to the intercourse between literature and medicine. Second, Budge wants to interrogate the unstable opposition between the Romantics’ belief in the [End Page 275] embodied nature of poetry and the imagination and their simultaneous belief in an immaterial mind or soul. As Budge demonstrates, this opposition was often staged in terms of undesirable bodily specters produced by overwrought nerves versus the kind of transcendent vision claimed by Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Budge’s study falls in line with the recent critical trend of locating Romanticism’s claims to transcendent experiences within the material body. However, Budge shows that these writers often attempted to retain a concept of the transcendent in spite of their belief in the bodily nature of perception. Third, Budge aims to underscore the continuities between Romantic and Victorian, British and American writers and artists, insofar as they all drew on—consciously or not—the ideas of Brunonian medicine. Chapter 1 explores how Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels dramatize the need for readerly self-control. Although Radcliffe is often considered a key propagator of the sort of overstimulating novels deemed dangerous to readers’ health by many doctors in the Romantic period, Budge situates Radcliffe within Romantic discourses about the nervous system to demonstrate her awareness of and participation in the Romantic-era project of disciplining enthusiasm. Pointing to her repeated invocation of the language of apparitions and specters in The Mysteries of Udolpho, coupled with her character’s refusal to submit to these figments of the imagination, Budge portrays Radcliffe as an ironic and self-reflexive writer indebted to a neurological concept of the imagination. Chapter 2 begins by looking at the connection between Victorian conceptions of “health” and “manliness” and Wordsworth’s claims to an intuitive understanding of the transcendent. Tracing the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s reformulation of Brunonian medical tenets on Wordsworth’s views of poetry, Budge clarifies Wordsworth’s claim in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that his poetry represents a mild stimulant able to cure overstimulation. While this notion reflects a unified theory of mind and body, Wordsworth could not accept Darwin’s merely materialist view of this continuum. Instead, Budge argues that Wordsworth combined Darwinian ideas with the philosophical intuitionism of the Common Sense school to develop a therapeutic poetics that preserves the predominance of soul in its conception of the self. The longest chapter in the book, and the most persuasive in my opinion, Chapter 3 treats Coleridge’s appropriation of digestive metaphors to defend the healthiness of genius. Through close readings of several enigmatic passages in Coleridge’s notebooks, Budge outlines Coleridge’s view of the imagination as enabling the...

Love, Mobile Phones and the Codification of Intimacy in Contemporary Yemen

This article explores practices of ‘remediation’ of love poetry via the mobile phone among countrymen (qabaʾil) of the Yemeni highlands. Qabaʾil respond to rejection in love and to failed marriage by venting their passion through poems of the qasida genre. The romantic discourse of qasidas is inherently conservative and provides a cathartic function and a rationalization of loss. This romantic discourse overtly contradicts dominant ideals of manliness and Islamic morals, yet can be publicly expressed because it is mediated in poetry. The remediation of this discourse via the mobile phone has produced a new poetic genre: the risala. By sending risala poems through mobile phones, the qabaʾil establish a direct contact with women and shape a discourse of intimacy which can set the premises for future conjugal choices. The romantic discourse of the risala is thus generative and constitutes a motivation for action. The analysis of the link between the qasida, the risala and mobile phones demonstrates how ‘new’ media can refashion ‘older’ media, and how discrepant emotions can be distributed in distinct discourses through different media.

Uncivilized emotions: Romantic images and marginalisation of the <em>Gitanos</em>/Spanish gypsies

This article examines the emotional aspects of Western Romantic discourse on Spanish Gitanos, starting from the assumption that this is a cultural construction that contributed to the civic marginalisation and political persecution of the Romani people. By examining the emotive language of observers and the emotional ‘nature’ they attributed to this community, the stereotyped emotional foundation of ‘Gypsiness’ can be dismantled. It is argued that this discourse, which reveals the affective anxieties of majoritarian society, linked emotions attributed to the Gitanos with their alleged inability to adapt to modern society, thus justifying that they are an unassimilable community.

Nathalie Etoke's bipolar narratives of doomed national romance

Nathalie Etoke's novels Un amour sans papiers (1999) and Je vois du soleil dans tes yeux (2008) deal with the hardships of the African postcolonial condition in the global era through the trope of doomed romance. In these novels, the plight of the postcolonial nation-state drives people to emigrate in a search for more viable prospects. While the mobility theme addressed in her novels is typical of third-generation African literatures in general, Etoke's vision simultaneously struggles against the postnationalist currents informing this literary paradigm. Indeed, Etoke's novels are quite loud and didactic in their articulations of political commitment towards the nation and the continent. Etoke holds on to the anticolonial romance narrative, but at the same time cannot ignore its inevitable failures in the present. This leads to a tension that marks her work by giving it a bipolar character, one that manifests itself in the constant oscillation between utopianism and disillusionment. The bipolar quality of the texts betrays a discomfort that the narratives' promotion of an anticolonial struggle for nationhood and decolonisation generate in a postcolonial era that keeps witnessing the failures of these romantic discourses to realise themselves. A close reading of the novels reveals that this discomfort finds its articulation in the narrative fabric of the texts.

Glass, Hildrun Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumnischen Machtbereich 1940–1944 (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 780 Western world. One hopes that misprints like ‘the 70th birthday of Stalin in 1950’ (as it appears on p. 148) instead of 1949 or Tarangog (p. 139) instead of Taganrog will be corrected in the paperback edition. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main Alexey Tikhomirov Glass, Hildrun. Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumänischen Machtbereich 1940–1944. R. Sudosteuropäische Arbeiten, 152. Oldenbourg, Munich, 2014. 303 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. €44.95. The name of Hildrun Glass is synonymous with the forensic analysis of the fate of the Jews in Romania in the three decades following the end of the First World War. Her study on the Jewish experience between 1944 and 1949 (Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen, Munich 2002) established itself as the essential work of reference on this topic and it is no surprise that this new study should be based on the same rigorous dedication to research. ThethemeofthisbookistheinteractionbetweenNaziGermanyandRomania in the development and implementation of the ‘solution to the Jewish question’ in the respective countries and in the areas which the German and Romanian regimes controlled. Dr Glass identifies three stages in this interaction in the period 1940–44: congruence, 1940–41; divergence, 1942; and disagreement 1943/1944. The Holocaust in Romania was unlike that in other parts of Europe and the Soviet Union. In the first place, the mass murder of Jews by shooting in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1941, was carried out by the Romanian authoritiesunderIonAntonescu’smilitarydictatorship,atatimewhenRomania was a sovereign German ally. A congruence of German and Romanian policies can be identified in General Ion Antonescu’s policy of ‘ethnic purification’. Yet Antonescu acted upon his own initiative in resolving the ‘Jewish question’ (the term employed in official Romanian discourse of the time) and did not act under pressure from Berlin. Expulsion of the Jews from Romania was the tool for policy implementation; Mihai Antonescu — the vice-premier but no relation to the General — made this clear at a cabinet meeting over which he presided on 17 June 1941, only a few days before the German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union. Second, the deaths of Jews at the hands of the Romanians were the result not only of systematic killing, but also of deportation in 1941 and its consequences. Third, Romania’s ‘Jewish policy’ was independent of Germany in the sense that Antonescu acted of his own volition regarding the Jews, but in a context established by Nazi domination of continental Europe. Thus, in the summer of 1942 Antonescu changed his mind about acceding to German requests that REVIEWS 781 the remaining Jewish population of Romania — from the Banat, southern Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia — be deported to the death camps in Poland. Here we have Dr Glass’s ‘divergence’ stage. Antonescu’s about-turn on deportation may be seen as opportunism but it was an opportunism that saved the remaining Jews of Romania from death camps in Poland. Had the Iron Guard still been in power in Romania, there is no doubt that it would have acceded to the German request to implement the Final Solution. One can only speculate on whether events on the battlefield in November 1942 led Marshal Antonescu to modify his position on deportation. He was astute enough to realize that a short war against the Soviet Union offered the best chance of a victory. After the crushing defeat of the Axis armies at Stalingrad — where two German armies and two Romanian armies were decimated before the German Sixth Army was encircled — Antonescu became concerned that he would have to answer to the Allies for his actions. In mid December 1942, with an eye to ingratiating himself with the Western powers, Antonescu decided that the solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Romania was emigration rather than deportation — the stage of ‘disagreement’. On 12 December, Manfred von Killinger, the German ambassador to Romania, informed the German Foreign Ministry that Radu Lecca, the Romanian official responsible for Jewish affairs, had received instructions from Antonescu to organize ‘the emigration of 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to Palestine and Syria’. The only condition for emigration was payment by each emigrant of 200,000 lei. Despite...

Women's travel writing and the legacy of Romanticism

Women's travel writing reveals how literary and artistic discourses influence the way we read and write about journeys. This paper considers the way women's travel writing has adapted to, and adopted, the discourse of Romanticism, from its beginnings as a philosophy of political and sexual revolution, individual freedom and escape, to a more diffuse sense which has infiltrated modern attitudes to travel. We consider a classic travel text from the Romantic period, and discuss its legacy. Adopting Buzard's argument [(1993). The Beaten track: European tourism, literature and the ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918. Oxford: OUP], we consider how travel changed through the long nineteenth century. We discuss how the twentieth-century Romantic attraction of travel is marketed through the tourist industry as one of the main reasons to get away from it all and discover the ‘authentic’: this desire is reflected in travel texts. Recent writing reflects the influence of Romanticism by celebrating the individual as a wandering free spirit on a self-quest, whose writing is ‘authentic’, spontaneous and confessional: that is, the legacy of sensibility. We conclude that Romanticism has left a dual legacy for travellers, of political commitment and inner journey. Authors discussed include Mary Wollstonecraft, Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird and Sara Wheeler.

La relación entre productor y consumidor en sistemas alimentarios locales: análisis de sus prácticas y narrativas

Los sistemas alimentarios locales, conocidos como local food systems, han crecido en popularidad en todo el mundo en los últimos años. Previa literatura en este campo ha puesto énfasis en el carácter contrahegemónico de estas iniciativas resal- tando la re-conexión de los productores y los consumidores y, a su vez, se señala una objeción a la agricultura industrial que ofrece productos anónimos y desconectados de su productor y de su lugar de origen. Sin embargo, dichos discursos románticos no siempren se comprueban a través de la evidencia empírica. En este estudio realizamos una comparación empírica entre dos sistemas alimentarios locales: las denominadas Community Supported Agriculture en Manhattan, Nueva York y las Cooperativas de Consumo Responsable en Cataluña, España. En base a la utilización de una metodo- logía cualitativa se identifican y se exploran las prácticas y narrativas de establecidas entre el productor y consumidor que también se definen por la orientación y raison d’être del sistema local.

The Art of Redundancy: Sublime Fiction and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Since its publication in 1826, critics have disparaged Mary Shelley’s The Last Man as a bad copy of a tired theme. To the contrary, I argue that Shelley was well aware of the place of her work within the discourse of Lastness that had become so popular during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Shelley made explicit reference to the fact that her novel was a late contribution to the robust discourse on Lastness. She drew attention to the ways in which the concept of repetition is, ironically, pervasive to this discourse. And she intentionally situated Lastness within nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, still widely inflected by Edmund Burke’s theory of sublime. Shelley’s novel explores the limitations of Burke’s theory, which relies upon the concept of art as repetition to establish the necessity of critical distance for a properly sublime experience. The novel re-envisions repetition as a concept that dissembles Burkean critical distance and the hierarchy between the real and the fictional on which it depends. Both a critique of Romantic aesthetic discourse and a major contribution to it, Shelley’s Last Man refigures aesthetic experience, critiquing the limitations of Burke’s sublime without vitiating the potentiality for sublime fiction.

Discourses of Empire and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Bessarabia: Russian–Romanian Symbolic Competition and the 1912 Anniversary

SUMMARY: This article discusses the celebration of the centenary of Bessarabia’s annexation to the Russian Empire in May 1912 and its significance for the conflicting rival Russian and Romanian discourses over this region in the early twentieth century. The authors argue that this event marked a defining moment in the consolidation of Bessarabia’s status as a contested borderland and had a powerful influence on the mutual Russian and Romanian claims to the province’s “symbolic inclusion.” On the one hand, it represented the high point of the attempts of the imperial authorities and the Russian public sphere to construct a coherent image of the province and to forge a representation of Bessarabia as an organic part of the imperial polity. On the other hand, it stimulated a “symbolic competition” between the Russian and Romanian visions of Bessarabia and its population, adding further complexity to Russian–Romanian relations both in the political and symbolic spheres. The Bessarabian case is an excellent illustration of the shifting patterns of identity politics and political mobilization in the late Russian Empire. The 1912 anniversary led to a “hardening” of the imperial discourse while also emphasizing its uneasy cohabitation with the “nationalizing motives” and its internal contradictions. The 1912 ceremonies performed in the Russian Empire also had consequences for the Romanian national narrative, including the firm placing of Bessarabia on the map of the Romanian intellectual community and the increased presence of Bessarabian topics in the political debates of the day. The peripheral Bessarabian context acted as a mirror for the dilemmas of state-building and identity construction in both cases. On the Russian side, the older concepts of dynastic loyalty and Orthodox unity had to adapt to the nationalizing vocabulary of ethnicity and “populist” rhetoric; on the Romanian side, the broadly shared national consensus was questioned in terms of priorities and ultimate goals. These processes intersected in May 1912, when the Russian and Romanian “scenarios of belonging” were enacted on the occasion of the festive ceremonies in Bessarabia and the opposing “rituals of commemoration” in the Romanian Kingdom. В этой статье обсуждается празднование столетнего юбилея присоединения Бессарабии к Российской империи в мае 1912 г. и использование этого события российскими и румынскими общественно-политическими дискурсами, которые боролись за этот регион в начале ХХ века. Авторы доказывают, что юбилей 1912 года стал определяющим моментом в закреплении статуса Бессарабии как оспариваемой окраины ( contested borderland ) и во многом повлиял на российские и румынские притязания, связанные с символическим включением Бессарабии в пространство империи или нации. С одной стороны, юбилей знаменует собой высшую точку усилий властей империи и российского общественного мнения по конструированию цельного образа бессарабской окраины как неотъемлемой части политического пространства империи. С другой стороны, события 1912 г. придали новый импульс символическому противостоянию между российским и румынским видением Бессарабии и населения края, усложнив и без того непростые русско-румынские отношения в политическом и символическом поле. Бессарабский случай – прекрасный пример изменений, происходивших в области политики идентичностей и политической мобилизации в поздней Российской империи. Церемонии 1912 года привели к ужесточению имперского дискурса, но также выявили проблемы его сосуществования с националистическими тенденциями и его внутренние противоречия. Празднества, организованные в Российской империи в мае 1912 г., имели серьезные последствия и для румынского национального нарратива. Они выразились, прежде всего, в окончательной локализации Бессарабии на ментальной карте румынского интеллектуального сообщества и во все более ощутимом присутствии бессарабской тематики в тогдашних политических дискуссиях. Периферийный бессарабский контекст явился своеобразным зеркалом, отображавшим процессы государственного строительства и конструирования идентичностей. В российском случае, традиционные понятия династической лояльности и православного единства все больше приспосабливались к национализирующему языку этничности и к популистской риторике. В Румынии был поставлен под вопрос национальный консенсус, которому долгое время следовали политические элиты. Как приоритеты, так и окончательные цели румынского национального проекта подверглись сомнению и критике. Эти процессы пересеклись в мае 1912 г., когда российские и румынские сценарии пространственного воображения вступили в открытое противостояние по случаю праздничных церемоний в российской Бессарабии и ответных “ритуалов памяти” в Румынском королевстве.

Kleists Teichoskopie auf die Moderne. Über Kollektive, Meuten, Subjekte und das Tier-Werden im Trauerspiel Penthesilea

AbstractIn Kleist’s so called »Trauerspiel«Assuming this perspective on the text it is now possible to negotiate subjectivity and individuality as ideological constructions. This allows for approaching its deconstruction as well as other modes of being such as group-formation, hybrid and the pack. By associating Penthesilea to her dogs Kleist’s text aims at the fragile status of human beings in the Modernity. Penthesilea is thus turned into an animal. As a murderous pack the female protagonist stands amongst being aTo understand Kleist’s »ethnological view« on the constitutive self-descriptions of Modernity, it is expedient to read Penthesilea as an ontological experiment. With the help of the concept of theTo meet the significance of Penthesilea’s tragedy it is indeed necessary not to stop at the point of understanding the Becoming-Animal as a subversive and critical act. With Bruno Latour’s ethnological view on Modernity it is possible to re-construct Kleist’s strategy of talking about Becoming-Animal as shift to reconsider the way of assembling human and non-human actors. The pack will be understood as a specific group-formation and the Becoming-Animal as a mode of existence. In his latest workModernity, Latour argues, has always constituted Nature as an objective external place, whereas Society has always been constituted as the place of subjects. Around 1800 the practices of separation and purification of hybrids and group-formations are expressed through a dispositive of humanism that emerges amidst the tension of the discourses of romanticism, classicism, medicine, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy of the subject. The aim of the present article is to show that the entanglement of those mentioned theories by Latour and Deleuze/Guattari is important for the understanding of Kleist’s critical view on the fragile constructedness of the subject as a human being.Therefore the play makes use of a narrative strategy which is highly apt to show those compounds: the »teichoscopy«. With this seemingly detached way of observation Kleist is able to report not only on the practices of separation and purification, but also on the hybrids and group-formations.The article adopts this strategy to observe both sites of Kleist’s understanding of the Modernity. Hence, section 2 of the analysis starts with a first teichoscopy on hybrids and group-formations in the (self-)descriptions of Amazons and Greeks.On the basis of the state of war the protagonists in the play are always associated with animals, things and other humans. With the focus on Achilles and Penthesilea it is significant how language is involved in constructing, out of these hybrids, the dichotomy between subject and object and therefore unambig­uous ontological statuses. However, with the term of Becoming-Animal that dichotomy is suddenly uncertain. On this account the aim is to understand animals and things not asThat leads to the second teichoscopy in section 3. The focus shifts now to Penthesilea’s process of Becoming-Animal. This allows to show the power of Modernity as well as their concepts of »human« and »animal«. Therefore Penthesilea’s association with her dogs and the slaughter of her lover Achilles – as a dog, like a dog and with her dogs – is not displayed in the play, but it is reported by the Amazons. This uncertain form of report points to the crux of Kleist’s tragedy: Penthesilea and her dogs undermine the established regulatory power and the dispositive of humanism around 1800. Still, Kleist does not persist in an elaborated ideal. For that he demonstrates the counter-mechanisms of Modernity on Penthesilea: this includes turning Penthesilea literally into an animal, or in other words, transforming the Becoming-Animal into a solid state of being by means of performative speech.Under those circumstances the perspective changes in section 4: the play abandons the strategy of teichoscopy in favour of the monologue to execute on Penthesilea a radical re-subjectivation. The asymmetry of Modernity results in a desperate suicide: the pack yields the subject, instead of the group-formation a single human being comes to existence. Penthesilea has to remove all other non-human actors like her bow and her dogs from herself to understand herself as a human being in the way of Modernity.Consequently Becoming-Animal – as implied – is a mode of existence outside of established institutions. This mode breaks with the old institutions of Modernity established by the

Lietuviškosios religinės tapatybės raiškos užuomazgos ir jų ženklai XVII amžiaus LDK poezijoje: M. K. Sarbievijaus religinės tematikos tekstai

The subject-matter of this research is a Latin religious poetry written at the 17th century, primarily by Jesuit authors, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The texts analysed in the paper are seen as important to the further formation of Lithuanian religious identity and its poetical expression. It is possible to trace the influence of some Baroque Latin texts, especially of those written by M. C. Sarbievius (Sarbiewski), the most popular Latin poet in Lithuania through following centuries, on the religious poetry of the 19th century. Some topics, as presented in the later religious texts and often being explained as a mere reflection of Romantic discourse, seem to be derived from the baroque expression.

The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 by Dalia Nassar (review)

Reviewed by: The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 by Dalia Nassar Gabriel Trop Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 360 pp. In this rich and groundbreaking study, which ought to be considered one of the most important and formidable recent contributions to scholarship on early German Romanticism, Dalia Nassar sets out to rethink the category of the absolute [End Page 313] in texts by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. Nassar’s historically informed and textually sensitive account of these thinkers reframes their various attempts to grasp or conceptualize the absolute as an inherently relational, differential, and dynamic engagement with reality. The notion of a relational absolute seems, at first glance, counterintuitive or contradictory. The absolute, as that which is without limit and thus irreducible to things or conditions, has traditionally been understood to exclude differentiation and thus to be incompatible with relationality. And yet, Nassar shows with considerable conviction, clarity, and attention to detail that Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling—albeit each in different ways and with different emphases—gravitated toward the absolute as a figure of thought that helped them think relationally and thus reconcile oppositions between the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, or the differentiation of knowledge and the unity of being. As Nassar points out in her introduction, scholars of early German Romanticism have dramatically different ways of approaching the concept of the absolute. Some, such as Frederick Beiser, understand the Romantics to be Idealists, or philosophers who endow the absolute with some form of metaphysical and ontological reality. The other dominant interpretive paradigm for understanding the philosophical discourse of early German Romanticism has been articulated by Manfred Frank, who portrays the Romantics as skeptical thinkers. According to Frank, the Romantics view the absolute as a Kantian regulative idea: something that must be presupposed as that which makes experience possible but can never be conceptually grasped or exhaustively articulated. Nassar aligns herself more with Beiser’s account, although she differentiates herself from his tendency to see the Romantics as prioritizing Spinoza’s metaphysics over Fichtean self-positing. For Nassar, the Romantics remain invested in the “active and constructive nature of the self” (11) and are committed to the agency of Romantic creativity. In general, however, she steers a middle course between Beiser and Frank, or between scholars who conceptualize the absolute as a metaphysical ontology and those who see the absolute as a mere regulative idea. Nassar writes, “the romantics were concerned with the nature of reality—with the ‘absolute’ ground of being and knowing—and with our cognitive relation to it” (12). She therefore draws attention to an ambiguity in the Romantic discourse of the absolute: the absolute is at once ontological ground and epistemological relation. Indeed, in certain cases, most notably for Novalis, the absolute is explicitly described as a relational oscillation rather than as a ground of pure identity or a domain of indifferentiation. More importantly, Nassar’s account contests interpretations of the Romantics that portray them as postmodernists or poststructuralists avant la lettre. In so doing, she paves the way for a critical engagement with the Romantics that values both their alterity and their familiarity. Nassar suggests that one may historicize the Romantics and take them seriously as philosophers in their own right. In an academic climate that seems to be growing weary of postmodern skepticism, Nassar’s monograph appears at an opportune moment and ought to spur scholars to rethink the legacy of early German Romanticism. Within this broader gesture that simultaneously historicizes the Romantics and takes them seriously as philosophers, Nassar’s insights into the individual thinkers are no less valuable. The book is divided into three sections (each with four chapters), which focus respectively on Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling. The [End Page 314] chapters on Novalis are noteworthy for drawing attention to his later philosophical writings—above all, his studies on Kant and Franz Hemsterhuis. In these works, Novalis claims that the absolute is not something merely given but a task to be realized: the absolute is the unfolding of creative and free activity...

Romance Re-Scripted: Lost in Austen's comparative historical analysis of post-feminist culture

This paper argues that the British television drama serial Lost in Austen implicitly constructs a critical analysis of post-feminism. Firstly, it will argue that its complex narrative structure (travelling from contemporary London to the pages of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice) allows its female protagonist to ask important questions about the nature and relevance of feminism today. In particular, it enables it to rediscover feminist history in an attempt to reconnect it to a generation of young women who have arguably lost sight of its continuing significance. Secondly, it implicitly positions traditional romantic fiction as a cultural antidote to an overly sexualised post-feminist culture, one that continues to objectify the female subject while making young women complicit in their own oppression. In doing so, it arguably offers a critical evaluation of post-feminism while reinventing the emotional power of traditional romantic discourse for a contemporary age.

Why Do Some Consumers Prefer Organic Food? A Discourse Analytical Perspective

In an attempt to better understand the main motives behind organic food consumption, this study explores the consumer discourses of organic food. In all, 35 in-depth interviews were conducted, from which three major discourses were identified. These discourses were named primitivist, retro, and racialist. The data suggest that these Romantic discourses play on images of a supposedly glorious and innocent past. Consequently, consumers using these three discourses were more likely to prefer organic food, as they had a tendency to construct this type of food as more natural, authentic, and real. In this sense, Romantic discourses seem to offer more resonant themes for consumers than contemporary modern science can ever provide.

A civilisation at peril: Goethe's representation of Europe during the Sattelzeit

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The Epitaphic Poetry of Crabbe and Wordsworth

Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, building upon the work of Earl Austin Moore, argues that, historically, ‘the rate of specifically literary epitaph-writing is remarkably uneven’. He continues: ‘in England, two definite peaks are observable. One occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century, the other in the second half of the eighteenth century’. His subsequent claim that ‘the interest in epitaphs did not by any means die out immediately thereafter’ (Bernhardt-Kabisch, 113–14) is well-supported by a fairly lengthy census of pre-Romantic and Romantic-period literary epitaphs. Prominent among this survey is William Wordsworth, whose three ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ (the first of which was published in Coleridge’s The Friend for 22 February 1810; the second and third remained unpublished in full until 1876) constitute not only one of the most penetrating treatments of the subject in the early nineteenth century, but also, as W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser observe, ‘a notable contribution to Romantic poetics’. George Crabbe is mentioned only in passing in Bernhardt-Kabisch’s study of Romantic epitaphic writing, and this specific example reflects something of a general trend: typically, Crabbe has been a curiously marginal figure in Romantic critical discourse, and Arthur Pollard’s view of Crabbe as a figure who ‘stands between two distinct eras, the Augustan and the Romantic, belonging in part to both, yet owing total allegiance to neither’ has become something of a commonplace, despite the fact that most of Crabbe’s mature work was published after the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. In treating Crabbe as Wordsworth’s chronological contemporary, this essay examines, admittedly selectively for reasons of economy, the notably incongruent treatment of the epitaphic in each poet’s oeuvre. Both Crabbe and Wordsworth produced several examples of what Joshua Scodel defines as the ‘poetic epitaph’: ‘a poem inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon a tomb’. As Bernhardt-Kabisch’s list attests (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 129–31), anthologies of such poems proliferated from the early seventeenth century onwards, the chapter on ‘Epitaphes’ in William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605) and John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631, reprinted 1767) both proving particularly influential. Periodicals too, particularly the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, carried an increasing number of poetic epitaphs over the second half of the eighteenth century (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 131–2), a fashion which continued (having survived a post-1786 lull) into the early nineteenth century:

‘Stone is stone’: engagement and detachment in the craft of conservation masonry

Since the mid‐nineteenth century, craft has been characterized by relations of engagement, resonating with broader romantic discourses that idealize craftsmen in explicit contrast to forms of alienation linked to capitalist production. In recent work on craft, the analytic lens of engagement usefully highlights the dynamic interplay of human and non‐human agencies. Our own account builds on these ideas but suggests that the conceptual privileging of engagement creates interpretative problems, precluding ethnographic attention to the role of detachment in craft. Focusing on the skilled practices of conservation stonemasons, we describe the specific constellations of ideology and practice involved in cutting and fixing stone. Through elucidating masons’ own understandings of their work, we highlight their commitment to the ‘disciplined’ embodiment of tradition as a means of separating personal subjectivity from the stones they carve. Our analysis of the skilled practices required to work stone questions the primacy of engagement, suggesting instead that detachment and engagement are mutually implicated relational forms. This finding sheds new light on craft practice and offers a position from which to reconsider broader anthropological commitments to concepts of engagement.

"Let me die in your house": cardiac distress and sympathy in nineteenth-century British medicine.

This essay examines the prevalence of a romantic discourse (e.g., associated with the genre of romance) in nineteenth-century British treatises on diseases of the heart. The nineteenth century brought remarkable changes to cardiac medicine, from the stethoscope to the sphygmograph, rendering medical practice increasingly clinical. However, case histories of cardiac disorders from this period maintain a surprising frequency of three affective elements: sensationalism (exaggerated, dramatic, and shocking events and language), sentimentalism (pathos and melancholy), and imagined experience, where the narrator projects himself imaginatively into the lived experience of his subject. British cardiac texts during these professionalizing decades repeatedly use the ambiguous term “distress” to describe the symptoms of heart disorders but also the observer’s subjective response to the patient’s evident suffering. These “distressing” texts demonstrate how nineteenth-century British physicians narrativized their sympathy during a period we usually associate with the distancing of the patient-physician relationship.

The Discourses of Romanticism and Heroism in the Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

The Discourses of Romanticism and Heroism in the Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson

Reviewed by: Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson Blanford Parker Ritchie Robertson . Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine. New York : Oxford , 2009 . Pp. xvi + 441 . $110 . I have never been completely satisfied by schema that attempt to clarify the various modes of mockery—parody, travesty, mock-heroic, and the others. We know how satire works, though we may labor to explain its species. Mr. Robertson’s argument hinges on the idea that there is a constant if uneven development in satire that begins with mock-heroic and develops a greater and greater amorphous realism, which leads in the end to a blurring of [End Page 179] genre. The first great break in the progress of satire in the eighteenth century came with the extended mock-epic poem, and The Dunciad is the great exemplar. Pope moved from the elegant contrast between epic conventions and the quotidian world of Belinda in The Rape of the Lock to the heteroglossic tangle of The Dunciad. Mock-heroic here constitutes “a frigidly correct neoclassical poem,” while The Dunciad is an explosion of new imaginative energy. Pope’s battle with his enemies becomes an all-encompassing and obsessive project. It unconsciously elevates the lower register of satire—tradesmen, book-dealers, editors, astrologers, projectors, and the whole carnival of Grub Street. The line between high and low is obscured. Sometimes (we are told) the mock-epic grows up beside the older epic and sometimes it challenges its authority. I have one disagreement with this treatment of mock-heroic. As I have claimed elsewhere, The Rape of the Lock includes within it the romance novel of a later generation. First, there is a girl at court indulging in the leisure of the professional class. Second, there is the imposing figure of the rake. Third, there is the small event that causes a rupture in the seduction narrative. Belinda’s reaction to her loss of hair is psychological, not epical. She is the direct forebear of Burney’s heroines. For this reason I cannot accept a substantial break between the logic of mock-heroic poetry and the mock-epic which Mr. Robertson describes. He has some of the same problems all taxonomists of satire face. Because satire is an acidic genre (especially in the violent transition of the Enlightenment), it tended to flatten or defang the older humanist genres—particularly in the case of epic and pastoral. To be successful, the epic and the pastoral depend on a certain ethical attitude. In the case of epic it is the attitude of the classical fatalism of a military cult; in the case of pastoral it is the attitude of a first world—a world before the changes that constitute normal historical experience. For this reason, Mr. Robertson’s book is a helpful map. It shows us defections of classical genre brought on by satire and other forces with which it was allied. It shows us the whole complex of new literary types made possible by the supercessive character of Enlightened and Romantic discourse. In this sense, we may say that Voltaire’s La Pucelle, a text which Mr. Robertson reads with great dexterity, is an answer not only to the canons of neoclassical taste, but, and more forcefully, to the hagiographical narratives of the counter-Reformation. Perhaps it does not celebrate “a whole range of warm and sympathetic emotions,” but its attempt to replace the discourse of Christian asceticism with that of sexual passion is an adventure. The most telling of Mr. Robertson’s readings is his chapter on Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea. If we were to draw a line of development of the uses of mock epic from The Dunciad to the present (and Mr. Robertson goes so far as Kafka and Joyce), Goethe’s might be the most problematic text. It seems to be devoid not only of mock-epic parallelism, but of any satire at all. Mr. Robertson tells us that readers are divided as to what kind or degree of irony may be found in the text. I hold with those who see only a largely unintentional irony of Homeric prosody and imagery used to describe a modern sentimental situation. Mr...