Romantic Sensibility Research Articles

'Groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous System': Robert Burns and Melancholy.

Many currents in eighteenth-century Scotland--philosoph- ical, literary, medical and religious--served to influence how the poet, Robert Burns, understood his disturbed moods and how he described them in his poetry and letters. By tracking the chronology of his illness and the particular medical language he and his biographers drew upon in relation to the nervous theories current in Scotland and the cult of Romantic sensibility, this chapter examines how Burns' melancholy reflected and was related to the culture and historical period in which he lived.

Virtude e amor em Rousseau

Rousseau rompe o vínculo considerado indissolúvel entre consciência moral e consciência cultural, para dar lugar à relação entre natureza e ética, bem como revoluciona o modo de compreender o homem e sua relação com o mundo. Desconfiado da razão que não é educada pelos sentimentos o filósofo propõe, em Emílio, uma educação que defenda o coração do homem do erro e do vício provenientes da sociedade. Em Júlia ou a Nova Heloísa, um romance por meio de cartas, o autor combina o discurso da paixão com o discurso moral para mostrar o conflito entre o amor e o dever e indicar que amor e virtude são inseparáveis. Dramatiza posições filosóficas e contribui com a criação de uma nova ética e uma nova estética, em que se reafirma a formação do homem virtuoso. O artigo conclui que as duas obras marcam a contribuição decisiva de Rousseau para a criação de uma nova mentalidade que aspira à interioridade e à espontaneidade provenientes da natureza e que desperta a sensibilidade romântica.

Shelley's ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound (1820)

In an important recent study of the theories of the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, Tom Furniss has read Hutton’s 1788 text as ‘Romantic science’, arguing that Hutton’s depiction of the earth as a ‘self-sustaining. . . organism whose design bears witness to the wisdom and goodness of nature itself’ offers a model of nature that finds parallels in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Romantic theory. Demonstrating how Hutton’s text participates in the formation of Romantic culture, Furniss explores the continuities between Hutton’s ostensibly Enlightenment science and Romantic sensibilities. Building on Furniss’s argument, this paper reads Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) as a text that responds to both the empirical and Romantic character of Huttonian earth science, and crucially, as a text that uses the mechanisms of geological change Hutton posits in order to figure a characteristically Shelleyan revolution. It is a commonplace to read Shelley’s ideal model of socio/political reform as a gradual, non-violent and ideological revolution in which the values of the intellectual elite are filtered down and assimilated into the social body over generations. However, with regards to Prometheus Unbound, the structural mechanism through which Shelley figures this transformation has not been fully identified. I argue that a more coherent picture of the Shelleyan revolution emerges once the drama’s Huttonian deep structure is brought into relief, and that the geology of Shelley’s text, which has been read in terms of Georges Cuvier’s descriptions of the effects of serial geological catastrophe, can only be fully understood once the drama as a whole is framed within the wider cycles of Huttonian geological theory. Shelley’s depiction of sequential tyrannies – of ‘cancelled cycles’ and the ‘wrecks . . . of many a city vast’ (4.289, 296) – evokes Constantin Francois Volney’s The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), a text that Shelley knew well and that resonates in much of his politically charged poetry, and one that offered a powerful indictment of a world denied moral and intellectual maturity. That The Ruins made a ‘deep . . . impression upon Shelley’, and that ‘echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound’, has long been recognised. Also well known is Shelley’s adherence to the Godwinian view that political reform should ‘take place in a mild and gradual, though incessant advance, not by violent leaps’. In A Philosophical View

The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (review)

Reviewed by: The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer Jenifer S. Cushman Elizabeth R. Baer. The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Press, 2012. Pp. 229. Paper $27.95. ISBN 978-0-8143-3626-7. Responding to Theodor Adorno’s condemnation of poetry after Auschwitz, Elizabeth Baer urges readers to consider “the viability of imaginative works about the Shoah” (2) in The Golem Redux. But Baer’s work is no gauntlet thrown glibly down to Holocaust scholars, rather she traces the figure of the golem from its first mention in the Psalms to sixteenth-century Prague tales surrounding Rabbi Loew, and on to early twentieth-century versions, in order to support her reading of the golem in post-Holocaust works as a “tribute to Jewish imagination and imaginative literature.” (3) The role of the post-Holocaust golem, she asserts, is “to affirm the viability and authority of the imagination, of story, and of creativity.” (12) Baer’s discussions of language and word anchor her focus on intertextuality in later golem works as a vehicle for creativity. In her first chapter dealing with the Jewish tradition of the golem—and as a prelude to her discussion of intertextuality—she highlights both the speechlessness of the traditional golem figure, and the animating Hebrew words emeth (truth) or aemaet (life) that deanimate the golem when a letter is removed, resulting in meth, “death.” Baer’s four subsequent chapters treat, in order, pre-Holocaust non-English appropriations (Meyerink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, and Duvivier’s 1936 film Le Golem: the Legend of Prague), post-Holocaust traditional retellings (Bashevis Singer’s 1969 and 1982 The Golem, Wiesel’s 1983 The Golem, and Sherwood’s 2002 The Book of Splendor), portrayals in comic books and graphic novels (Marvel Comics 1970s Golem issues, Sturm’s 2001 The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Hamill’s 1997 Snow in August, and Chabon’s 2000 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and recent intertextually-rich golem manifestations (Ozick’s 1997 The Puttermesser Papers, Rosenbaum’s 2002 The Golems of Gotham, The X Files’s 1997 “Kaddish” episode and Handler’s 2000 Watch Your Mouth.) Certainly any work devoted to a figure as ubiquitous as the golem cannot claim to be exhaustive, but Baer enhances her work with an annotated bibliography of other golem texts in her epilogue. Throughout her analysis, Baer argues for the golem as the manifestation of the creative urge, both artistically and, as in Sherwood and Ozick, sexually. This particular focus, which culminates in a discussion of post-Holocaust golem tales, establishes her study as something more than a well-researched catalogue of golem-retellings. In her approach to each text, Baer summarizes [End Page 73] the work—including the details of the golem creation ceremony as a parallel to artistic creation—and skillfully addresses important themes that emerge in connection to the Holocaust. Her discussion of the most recent works proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, and she hones in on the significant differences among retellings, situating them in their socio-historical context. Although Baer’s comparison of Singer and Wiesel’s similarities strays into the realm of the irrelevant when she notes, for example, that both “enjoyed visiting Miami” (81), her biographical notes about the authors serve to locate their works in a specific setting. Her analysis thus provides insight into both the development of the figure and the malleability of its meaning, while acknowledging other golem scholars (87) and their contribution to the evolution of the figure. Baer’s treatment of the early twentieth-century German appropriations is particularly interesting in its handling of the nationalism inherent in popular culture surrounding the First World War and the transition to Weimar Germany. The tension between scientific and romantic sensibilities common to late nineteenth-century horror literature fed into apprehensions concerning the dehumanizing technologically-advanced battles of the First World War. On one very general level, early twentieth century literary monsters can be read as critiques of industrialization and science by a conservative central European populace terrified of the modern world. At...

The Basilica of Our Lady of Luján: transculturation to the pampas of romantic sensibility and Neo-Gothic theories

The work to preserve the Basilica of Our Lady of Luján and its site, enhancing its original values, occurred at a time and in a context shaped by late twentieth-century international cultural and scientific events. Those events have since redefined and changed both knowledge and working methods in art, science, technology and craftsmanship, and the response is to be seen in a reassessment of the built urban and architectural spaces inherited from the past. From that past, the ‘Gothic Revival’ was deeply rooted, particularly in France, Germany, the British Isles and Scandinavia, and strengthened cultural identities which became subjects of importance in the nineteenth century. In France, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was the leading figure in restoring the vision of a mediaeval past to life, a fundamental part of his government's cultural policy. His writings, his new ideas about architecture, structure and construction, his work to restore France's Gothic heritage, would have a strong impact on future generations in different parts of the world, including Argentina. In this South American country, the French architect Ulrico Curtois, a former student of Viollet-le-Duc, would translate his romantic ideals and the Neo-Gothic theories of his Master to the constructed forms of the Luján Basilica: a Neo-Gothic monument in the Argentine pampas. Listed as a National Historic Monument since 1999, it is presently undergoing complete conservation and restoration after almost ninety years of neglect.

Genealogy of nature conservation: a political perspective

Modern nature conservation is a product of post-Enlightenment modernity; I explore the heterogeneity of its conceptual and ideological background. The 19th century legacy comprises concern over human-caused extinctions; protests against excessive hunting and cruelty toward animals; utilitarian care for natural resources; and romantic sensibility concerning the value of nature for human health and spirituality. The 20th century added into conservation thinking increasing consciousness about human biospheric dependence; efforts to identify appropriate conservation targets; and most recently concern over the loss of biodiversity. The politics of nature conservation has taken shape within the framework of politics of nature, that is, choices vis-á-vis nature that have been made either as deliberate decisions on resource use or as side-effects of subsistence practices of various types. Because of tensions and conflicts with alternative ways of using nature, formulating realistic conservation policies has been a complicated task. Problems and uncertainties emerge: pursuing material aspirations of the current world society will necessarily bring about damage to ecological systems of the Earth. The way forward is to identify feasible alternatives in the midst of the tensions and ambiguities that arise, and to open up space for carrying through conservation initiatives.

Figuring the Grotesque in Louise Erdrich's Novels: Of Ojibwe Play, Modernist Form, and the Romantic Sensibility

Figuring the Grotesque in Louise Erdrich's Novels: Of Ojibwe Play, Modernist Form, and the Romantic Sensibility

Interzoning In after Zoning Out on Infrastructure

Interzoning In after Zoning Out on Infrastructure

Creative Synaesthesia in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck

Strong evidence in the field of neuroscience now makes it possible to claim, with minimal reservation, that E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary imagination was enriched by synaesthesia. E. T. A. Hoffmann is recognised as a remarkable polymath. A writer of fiction, bibliophile, composer and music critic, he not only understood Romantic sensibility but also involved himself in contemporary scientific debates on the nature of sound and perception, and was familiar with the acoustic theories of Ritter and Schubert’s work on magnetism and electrical energy. Hoffmann’s distinctive creativity was formed and informed by his diverse abilities and interests, and by his auditory sensibility and kinaesthetic appreciation of music. We postulate that the multi-sensory nature of Hoffmann’s work is evidence of creative synaesthesia, a phenomenon that occurs when a neurophysiological sensation perceived in the brain stimulates a different sense or senses and, as a result, produces a creative outcome. Taking as our example his intensely musical story Ritter Gluck, published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of February 1809, we examine Hoffmann’s complex and idiosyncratic use of metaphor and structure in the scientific context of his own time and continent, and in the context of 21st century scientific understandings of brain science.We are a sensorium commune, sensuous beings who perceive through many diverse senses at once.1

Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783-1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783-1830 Michael Ritterson Alison E. Martin , Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, Studies in Comparative Literature 13 (Oxford: Legenda, 2008). Pp. xi,187. $89.50. In her chapter "Sympathy and Spectacle: Visual Representation in Johanna Schopenhauer's Reise durch England und Schottland," Alison E. Martin notes: "Goethe, [the aesthetician Carl Ludwig] Fernow, and many like them had been magnetized by the form and the light of the Italian countryside in the classical arcadian visions embodied by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. However, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, it was increasingly the landscape of Britain that caught the imagination of German travellers" (115). Much of the British Isles' appeal lay in their rugged, irregular, somber landscapes and views that charmed with nature's imperfections.more consonant with the Romantic sensibilities of the new century than the "form and light of the Italian countryside." But even before the time of Schopenhauer's travels in England and Scotland (1803–05), there had been more than captivating landscapes to stimulate German interest in and travel to Britain: the Enlightenment had brought technological breakthroughs, "new intellectual and moral values, new canons of taste, forms of sociability, and views on human nature" (7). Martin's study is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of German travelogues on England in the fifty years under consideration; rather it offers detailed analysis of six accounts from a variety of political, social, and stylistic positions within German culture of the period. She notes in her introduction that "the claim of travel writers to speak with an authentic voice was . . . closely bound up with the discourses they employed. . . . The ability to engage affectively with the subject by means of imaginative projection was . . . paramount in this creation of a new style of travel writing" (4). Her twofold aim is therefore to analyze certain rhetorical practices in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German travel writing "to demonstrate how the traveller.the moving figure.was also moved by what he or she observed," and "to capture something of the range of impulses that travel writing gained from other aesthetic practices (not necessarily literary) for the purposes of sympathetic representation and in so doing to better understand the range of representational devices on which travel writers of this period drew" (5). The six writers thus selected are not best remembered for their travel accounts. Besides, and often obscuring, their activity as travel writers, they pursued interests and careers as educators, classicists, theologians, journalists, novelists, translators, essayists, salonnières, and theorists of music and painting. Three—Karl Philipp Moritz, Sophie von La Roche, and Johanna Schopenhauer.are still familiar names from the period; Esther Domeier (née Gad), Carl Gottlieb Horstig, and August Hermann Niemeyer are probably all but forgotten. All six seem to have shared a belief that vitality in travel writing, leaving a warm, vibrant impression on the readership, was necessary for a convincingly "truthful" account of the traveler's experience. Martin analyzes the modes these German visitors employed in presenting their observations, seeking to revivify scenes in the mind's eye of their readers rather than to lay out objective, informative, but ultimately lifeless collections of facts and descriptions. She takes these six case studies in the order of publication of their travel accounts, beginning with Karl Philipp Moritz's of 1783. Moritz, then a budding [End Page 278] novelist experimenting with character dialogue, reproduced scenes from the debates in Parliament and exchanges on the streets of London, with less concern for the content of oral discourse than for the rhetorical effect he had observed, creating a sense of immediacy and authenticity for his German readers. Sophie von La Roche, author of the quintessential German sentimental novel, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771), exemplifies for Martin the "problem of sensibility," that is, La Roche's attempt, as the first German woman to publish an account of travel to England, to balance "female" sentimental reflection with empirical narrative, description, and the rational ordering of evidence.all generally considered the preserve of male discourse. Though she sometimes failed to achieve...

Landscape of Contradictions: The Bourgeois Mind and the Colonization of Tokyo's Suburbs

Tokyo's suburban landscape has been treated in two distinct fields of research to date: urban history and literary studies. Urban historians have traced the effects of suburban population growth along the rail lines extending into the Musashi Plain to the west of the city from the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, literary scholars have identified the Musashi Plain as a special site or topos of modern nature writing since the publication of Kunikida Doppo's Musashino in 1898. This essay brings the issues of these two fields together to reappraise the meaning of suburban living within the mental landscape of the early twentieth-century Tokyo suburbanite. The focus is on two texts by popular novelist Tokutomi Roka, who moved to the suburban farming hamlet of Kasuya in 1907. Roka's romantic sensibility toward the landscape and his internal emotional dilemmas are interpreted as integral to one another and forming an archetypal pattern for the bourgeois male intellectual's experience of the modern suburb in Japan.

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (review)

Reviewed by: The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices Roger Cooter (bio) Tabitha Sparks , The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, 186 pp. $99.95 cloth. This book should not be judged by its title, though its publishers might. Tabitha Sparks, after all, is not a retired doctor with pretensions to literacy and history, but a sophisticated scholar with something to say and good reason to say it. Far from an empty exercise in doctor hunting, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel is a lucid analysis of how the medical profession functioned within and for the Victorian novel's prevailing marriage plot. Without any of the smoke and mirrors of "close reading," Sparks shows how the unifying logic of matrimony in the Victorian novel was tempered and tested over time through the persona of the medical man, and later (fatally for the marriage plot), the medical woman. The appearance of the doctor-character in Victorian fiction, she contends, "reflects not only the rise of science in culture . . ., but also the revised and revising fortunes of domesticity and marriage" (p. 25). It is the intertwined tension between them that she charts—a tension emblemized by, on the one hand, the "Physician" in Dickens's Little Dorrit (the benign professional steeped in empirical truth), and, on the other, Dr. Woodcourt in Bleak House (the personification of domestic morality and keeper of intimate secrets). The outcome is a tidy and revealing study of how the doctor-character maps a dynamic interface in Victorian culture between public and private spheres. As such, "Doctoring the Marriage Plot"—the title, in fact, of her first chapter—might better have served for the book as a whole. In a deceptively predictable move, Sparks begins her mapping with Dr. Lydgate in Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). But it is only to indicate how the historical pitch has been queered by Lydgate's canonical status as the doctor who failed to assuage the social ills of the 1820s and '30s with medical science. Sparks compares him with Dr. Hope in Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook (1838-39) to reveal, in contrast to Lydgate, how Hope fits a domestic plot that "reflects pre-scientific medicine's essentially civic and social identification" (p. 24). Dr. Hope dutifully lives into his name to serve as a worthy guide for companionate marriage ("cooperation over romance") of the sort approved of by Martineau, the popularizer of Benthamite political economy. Deerbrook thereby forges new literary ground in terms both of doctor-plotting and moving away from Austen-esque romantic sensibility and domesticity. But Spark's point in making the comparison is to indicate that Lydgate's scientific ambitions (and Eliot's later Victorian knowledge of [End Page 329] modern science and medicine) shaped a marriage relationship "negatively informed by an emotional-empirical divide" that was "not yet visible to Martineau in the 1830s" (p. 24). Nor was it to be obvious to many of the other doctor-deploying novelists she discusses; only partially and in oblique ways did it become manifest before the fin de siècle when, in the novels of scientists and vivisecting surgeons, entwined with the specter of the New Woman, the marriage plot went into steep decline. With the message in mind that even by the time of Middlemarch, the wand of science could still be seen as wielded by the human hand (and, as with Lydgate, could bring a doctor-character down), Sparks traces "the trajectory of love in an increasingly scientific age" (p. 45). More than a dozen novels and short stories are marshaled to do so, some of them, such as Edward Berdoe's Romances of a Medical Student (1887), being even less known than Deerbrook. Consistently, as in her discussion of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, where scientific realism is reconciled with the love story (p. 73), or Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866) and Heart and Science (1882), where resistance to empiricism is treated as "antithetical to the values and lessons of fiction" (p. 89), or the "women doctor novels" that demand "either a reassessment of the marriage plot as female destiny, or of medicine's later-century distance from...

Scenic tourism on the northeastern borderland: Lake Memphremagog's steamboat excursions and resort hotels, 1850–1900

Lacking the salt-water beaches, accessible mineral springs, and rugged mountains that attracted the first tourists to the northeastern United States, the Vermont–Quebec borderland did boast a number of clear and picturesque bodies of water, the largest of which was Lake Memphremagog. Once this lake became accessible by rail, American and Canadian promotional literature and graphic illustrations emphasized the romantic nature of its paddle-wheel excursions, scenic landscape, and resort hotels. This type of tourism was depicted as essentially a passive, civilizing experience in which participants affirmed their aesthetic sensibility and social status by admiring the view of lake and mountains from boat decks and hotel verandahs. But the exclusive nature of this romantic sensibility was undermined to some extent by the fact that local newspapers and railway companies encouraged groups of people from the surrounding communities to join the sight seeing tours. Local entrepreneurs were also quick to take advantage of the market for scenery and, in contrast to other tourist zones, there was no apparent conflict with the industrial development that was taking place at both ends of the lake.

Benjamin West’s A Bacchante

Benjamin West’s <i>A</i> <i>Bacchante</i>

Susan K Morrissey, Suicide and the body politic in imperial Russia, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 384, illus., £55.00, $99.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86545-6).

Susan K Morrissey, Suicide and the body politic in imperial Russia, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 384, illus., £55.00, $99.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86545-6). - Volume 52 Issue 3

Review: The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, by David Arnold

Review: The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science By David Arnold Reviewed by Fred Mason Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800-1856. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006. 298 pp., 8 illus. US $50.00 hardbound. Recycled, acid-free paper. David Arnold’s The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze deals with the ways European perceptions of the Indian subcontinent, of the land and the landscape, changed over the period of the early to mid-1800s. As he points out, conceptualizations of the landscape, largely created in tandem through travel narratives and scientific writing, were far from benign. Changing visions of the Indian landscape from “Oriental,” to later “wild and tropical,” fed heavily into imperial policy and helped determine the direction of use and “improvement” of the land. Arnold links together a number of disparate elements of culture and science in operation at the time. The author’s wide-ranging scholarship demonstrates that romantic sensibilities, particularly notions of “sublime vistas” and the tropicality of temperate climates, constituted an integral part of travel in India; that travel in turn constituted an integral part of scientific endeavor in India, particularly for botany; and that science, particularly botany, constituted an integral part of Britain’s imperial project. This work is a solid contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on landscape theory, which considers the relationship that people have with a physical piece of land, with the environment, largely through exploring the influence and development of cultural interpretations and frameworks. Arnold describes how India was slowly made to fit a framework of tropicality, with notions of plenty that go with it, despite in some places being arid and semi-desert. This sense of “tropical India” also brought with it notions of death and disease, which helped people cope with, or at least understand with some familiarity the high mortality rate among Europeans in India. Furthermore, tropicality suggested wilderness and lack of human occupation, which helped erase the memory of the longstanding Indian presence in their own country, thereby enabling colonial dominance with clearer consciences. The book also makes a good contribution to the history of science. In the last two chapters especially, the author describes a time of complexity and contradiction in science. “Networks of knowledge” established in the field of botany allowed colonial science to come to light in major cities in the British Empire and continental Europe, but created much tension between authoritative, metropolitan science, and colonial, more local forms of knowledge. Arnold’s work also demonstrates how scientific endeavor, Electronic Green Journal , Issue 26, Spring 2008 ISSN: 1076­7975

Royalty, Romance and Recreation

ABSTRACTThis article examines the growth of ‘heritage tourism’ by looking at three royal palaces: the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, each of which underwent a process of textual and architectural reconstruction during the nineteenth century which repositioned them both historically and culturally. It is argued that visitor responses to these sites were rarely, if ever, inspired by nationalism or royalism; more to the fore were Gothic and romantic sensibilities, popular conceptions of the past which were often democratic and self-improving, and the time-honoured practices of popular pleasure.

Two Patterns of Child Neglect: Blake and Wordsworth

Reading some well-known childhood poems by Blake and Wordsworth, the article challenges the accepted opinion that the Puritan and Romantic concepts of the child at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned as opposites. Instead, the article offers a reading that unravels the residues of Puritan and catechetical thinking in texts by two of the earliest advocates of the child's perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality. Though denouncing authoritarian and catechetical modes of interaction in which the child's speech is silenced, Blake and Wordsworth, writing at a moment of cultural transition, construct the child in a way that indicates a failure of their own declared purpose of redeeming the child's perspective and voice as valuably distinct from those of the adult. Although formally and grammatically the voice of Blake's poetic child is sometimes restored to him, the child is made a spokesman of a sophisticated and emphatically adult discourse of political radicalism. Similarly in Wordsworth, the construction of the child as a necessary layer in the uncovering of the poetic and autobiographical Self denies the child its valuable difference through an adult voice's ongoing narcissistic ventriloquism. The adult speaker's idealization of the child's freedom is ambiguated by the implicit association of freedom with parental neglect, which involves a disregard of the child's perspective. Thus, in contrast to the declared agenda of the poems, they also imply a desire that the child be less liberated and more regulated by the adult world.

Framing Narratives

Marianne Dashwood was well able to imagine circumstances both favourable and unfavourable to her. But for all her romantic sensibility she was not able to imagine these things from anything other than her own point of view. ‘She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.’ Unlike her sister, she could not see how the ill-crafted attentions of Mrs. Jennings could derive from a good nature. And when Elinor had to explain her troubles with Edward Ferrars, she knew that Marianne would feel it as a reminder of her own relations to Willoughby, judging Edward's behaviour as equivalent to that of Willoughby himself. Without the capacity to shift her point of view, Marianne can get no ironic distance from herself; she cannot see the unrealism of her later determination ‘to live solely for my family’.

Framing Narratives

Marianne Dashwood was well able to imagine circumstances both favourable and unfavourable to her. But for all her romantic sensibility she was not able to imagine these things from anything other than her own point of view.‘She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.’ Unlike her sister, she could not see how the ill-crafted attentions of Mrs.Jennings could derive from a good nature. And when Elinor had to explain her troubles with Edward Ferrars, she knew that Marianne would feel it as a reminder of her own relations to Willoughby, judging Edward's behaviour as equivalent to that of Willoughby himself. Without the capacity to shift her point of view, Marianne can get no ironic distance from herself; she cannot see the unrealism of her later determination ‘to live solely for my family’.