Romantic Theory Research Articles

“Apotheosis of Poesy”: The blue flower as a Romantic theory of the novel

“Apotheosis of Poesy”: The blue flower as a Romantic theory of the novel

Poetry’s “shimmering robes”

Despite the many essays that provide instructive tracing of Carl Jung’s archetypes in Romantic literature (and elsewhere), critics have declined to examine the important implications and consequences of parallels between Jung’s theory of artistic awareness and Romantic aesthetic ideology. This ideology finds expression in the language of Blake, Percy Shelley, Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth and others regarding artistic creativity, specifically its origins and aims, but especially the creative process itself. In this essay, I examine the way Jung samples Romantic ideas and imagery in his characterization of art and in his conception of the religious experience of the artist in the act of creation. In doing so, I suggest that attachment to popular (not always accurate) Jungian ideas about art has reinforced the continued acceptance of compelling Romantic myths about unconscious creativity. I argue that, in his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” and other essays, as part of an effort to liberate modern conceptions of art from reliance on mechanistic views of the human mind, Jung impeaches the merits of the Freudian model tied to medical forensics and installs in its place a Romantic theory of art rooted in the idea of intuitive creativity.

William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969)

Abstract This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams’s Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of “creative anachronism” in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable by posterity. Mr. Penrose, written in America in 1776, published in a heavily redacted version in Britain in 1815, and finally published in full in 1969, offers a means of apprehending the far less familiar dynamics of “pathetic anachronism,” wherein a text repeatedly fails to connect with the successive historical moments of its appearance and remains uncanonized. This stalled trajectory of Williams’s novel helps to illuminate the limitations of conventional discourses of textual recovery by tracing them back to tropes of the “found manuscript” and transatlantic shifts in genre popularity in the eighteenth century, as well as Romantic theories of temporal disjunction and the emergence of the historical novel in the nineteenth century and models of textual editing and debates over “the first American novel” in the twentieth century.These three versions of Williams’s novel . . . help us to see how various intellectual, aesthetic, generic, and material factors can mitigate against a text fitting into the mechanisms critics typically deploy to advance the positive qualities of anachronism.

Julie von Bechtolsheim, a Political Life: Women's Work and Governance in the Age of Revolution

AbstractThis article understands how women and girls in the Grand Duchy of Saxe‐Weimar‐Eisenach negotiated core issues in the Age of Revolutions: early industrialization and political representation. The baroness Julie von Bechtolsheim (1751–1847) leveraged war, widowhood, courtly connections, and poetry to pursue a public ‘career’ as First Principal of Eisenach's Women's Association (Frauenverein) from 1814 to 1831, establishing a material link between her private estate and the political estate. The Association itself was contrived as a polity in microcosm. Accusations of Bechtolsheim's ‘despotic’ governance prompted a majority bourgeois managerial staff to establish electoral conventions. Not all women had equal claim to citizenship, however. The Association's records reveal a Romantic theory of labour that reinforced a social order built on women's work, and its ‘Industry School’ sustained a supply of female labour into the state's predominant industry, linen manufacture, as into the servant's quarters of its affluent homes.

Urbanität und Geselligkeit

Abstract The article explores the early Romantic theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, focusing on their re-conception of urbanity (urbanitas) as it relates to the Romantic project of a union of poetry and life. The article argues that Schlegel and Schleiermacher work to establish a new ethos of interaction (indifferent to the medium) that claims validity in the literary and social fields. It reconstructs Schlegel’s theory of the formation of ethos during the Athenäum period, which he applies to the writer as the paradigm of the ‚speaker‘ under new public conditions and the essay as the paradigm of negotiating uncertain knowledge. Schleiermacher’s attempt to develop a theory of social behaviour, which emerged during his time in Berlin, forms the complement to Schlegel’s poetics on the side of social practice. The essay thus shows how rhetorical knowledge is reformulated and connected to practice after the end of the discipline.

The plastic dimension of the balcony scene in the movie (Romeo and Juliet) and its relationship to the movie and theatrical original text

This research deals with one scene from the movie Romeo and Juliet, which is the balcony scene, due to the importance of this scene in the formation of the construction of the subsequent events of the movie.
 The first chapter contained the methodological framework of the research, where the research problem was identified in how Zeffirelli dealt with the balcony scene in the play Romeo and Juliet and enriched it in the cinematic language with a comparison with the original text of the scene. In the balcony scene with comparative parts between the film and the text and the limits of the research that was limited to the film Zeffirelli and the translated text by Munis Taha Hussein.
 The second chapter contained the theoretical framework and previous studies, where the theoretical framework included three sections, the first on Shakespeare and the Romantic Theatre, the second on Romeo and Juliet and the construction of the romantic play, and the third, Romeo and Juliet in the cinema.
 The third chapter included the research procedures, where the researcher used the descriptive and comparative approaches and the research tool extracted from the theoretical framework and previous studies.
 The fourth chapter contains the results, their discussion, and the analysis of the research sample, the indicators that the researcher reached. The fifth chapter included a summary of results, conclusions, suggestions, sources and supplements

The Holy Abyss of the Absolute: Poe’s Critique of Schelling in “Morella” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Abstract This article examines the impact of Schelling’s philosophy, especially his concept of the Absolute, on two of Poe’s tales: “Morella” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It begins with a focused overview of Schelling’s chief doctrines, in particular his famous system of identity, and because this system was forged under the influence of Spinoza’s monism, the revival of the Dutch philosopher’s ideas in post-Kantian German philosophy is also briefly discussed. The article expands on one of the outcomes of this philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth century, namely, the perceived deficiency of philosophical and scientific inquiry and the ensuing privileging of art. As has been recognized, this shift had a direct bearing on emerging Romantic aesthetics, and its emphasis on the symbol as a way of conveying the inexpressible, of revealing the conceptually ungraspable. Both the Romantic theory of the symbol and Schelling’s idea of the Absolute provide a conceptual framework for understanding the philosophical resonances of “Morella” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Die (Spiel-)Welt muss romantisiert werden! – Die Rezeption europäischer Romantik in Walking Simulator-Games

This essay specifies how a sub-genre of the digital adventure game – the so-called walking simulator – reproduces and reflects ideas, motifs, and (narrative) structures of European Romanticism. The goal here is to draw attention to the genre’s potential for the academic discussion, analysis, and teaching of Romantic theories and patterns. To achieve this, I provide an introductory overview on the history of the walking simulator with emphasis on the early experimental games Explorer, The Forest, and LSD: Dream Emulator. An analysis of Dear Ether’s landscape design and narrative structure serves as access point into the discussion of how the Romantic ideas of 1. the sublime, 2. the silent poetry of nature, and 3. The Freudian Uncanny as well as the storytelling techniques of 1. synesthesia, 2. (reflective and meditative) walking, 3. fragmented narratives, and 4. (romantic) self-referentiality have been used in different walking simulators (such as Proteus, What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home, and The Beginners Guide) to tell (spatial) stories about emotions, identity, individuality. Walking simulators subvert traditional expectations towards digital games and, through their use of Romantic storytelling techniques, have changed the discourse about digital games as not only entertainment but a form of art.

The Pragmatics of Romanticism. Edmund Burke as Art Theorist

The article is devoted to the pragmatic aspects of Edmund Burke’s theory of art. The author identifies pragmatic components in the works of the British philosopher of various genres. The emphasis is on the interdisciplinary nature of Burke’s theory of art, which included artistic, psychological and political dimensions. The pragmatic dimension of Burke’s thought opens up a new field of research in the field of romantic aesthetics and art theory. The pragmatic romanticism of the British thinker complements our ideas about classical and modern art. His ideas shed new light on the development of Western European art from Baroque and classicism to avant-garde and postmodernism. At the same time, the problems of aesthetics, as well as the problems of power, are considered by Burke in a “psychoanalytic” and semiotic way, that is, without evaluation, and romantic special effects are subjected to objective analysis both in literature and art, and in politics. The pragmatic dimension allows us to redefine the role of Burke as the true founder of scientific art studies, who anticipated the most modern methods of analyzing artistic processes. The physiological, natural-scientific connotations of Burke’s work are also studied in the context of pragmatic strategies, as opposed to idealistic interpretations of the romantic theory of art.

The Organic and the Eclectic in César Daly’s “De l’architecture de l’avenir”

Abstract In The Organic and the Eclectic in César Daly’s “De l’architecture de l’avenir,” Gary Huafan He explores Daly’s concept of eclecticism as a critical discourse in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about naturalism and architectural style. In the 1869 essay that is the focus of this article, Daly narrated the “social evolution” of architecture as a process oscillating between organic and eclectic phases and mapped the history of style onto a parallel movement of French political regimes from antiquity to the Second Empire. Written after the fierce academic debates that took place in Paris in the 1860s and immediately prior to the tumultuous events of 1870–71, “De l’architecture de l’avenir” demonstrates the critical intersection between the romantic theory of architecture and nineteenth-century French politics. This key text in Daly’s oeuvre challenges contemporary understandings by demonstrating the vital role of eclecticism in the development of a modern architectural style.

Des éléments systémiques qui sautent les barrières des systèmes

Patrick SÉRIOT, Univ. of Lausanne : «Systemic Elements Jumping across the Limits between Systems»
 If language is «a system where everything is linked», the elements of the system can exist only inside the system. As their existence is only oppositive, they cannot materialize to jumping across the limits of the system.
 It is therefore interesting that in the 1920' and 1930' two founders of phonology, R. Jakobson and N. Trubetzkoy, constantly strove to bring to the fore such «phonological unions of languages», where intrasystemic characteristics link several languages, which are not cognate, but geographically neighbouring.
 The main point of this paper is that this lag between systemic principles and the claim that systemic characteristics can materialize to such an extent that they can pass from one system to another, can he understood only by reference to philosophical and epistemological problems, which include the biological conceptions of this period, the common ideological («eurasianist») conceptions in the Russian emigration, and, finally, the reception of romantic scientific theories (Naturphilosophie) in the Russian culture.

Philosophy of literature and the methodology of studying of poetic texts: In honor of the 80th anniversary of professor V. S.Nikonenko

The article deals with the anniversary of an eminent historian of Russian philosophy V. S.Nikonenko (1942–2013), who is the author of well-known works, a member of St Petersburg State University. The author of the article presents the theory of analysis of philosophical content of poetic texts, created in late Nikonenko’s works. Studying Pushkin’s and Zhukovsky’s poetry, Nikonenko asserts that Russian literature reached the new stage of self-consciousness in the beginning of the 19th century. It was not only a literature, but it has become a worldviewing paradigm of Russian thought. A poet thinks not in metaphysical, but in concrete image form. A poetical image is not a concept. It is a symbol expressed in verbal eidetic pattern. Pushkin is a propagandist of the general moral, political and metaphysical ideas presenting in symbolical poetical images. However, it is very difficult to rationalize poetic images at all. Pushkin’s typical heroes are ideal patterns and eidetic images of contemporary men. The specificity of poetic image is the possibility to interpret it in many conceptual dimensions. A poetic image is unknown in rational form: it is understood irrationally. Nikonenko holds the romantic theory of the impossibility of recognizing the essence of poetic image by poets and literal heroes. Pushkin expresses his ideal content in specific symbolic form of the prophecy. He uses verbal poetic symbols which could be analyzed only in a week sense because they are metaphors and not concepts. So poetic truths are not the logical ones. They are sentences having only apparent logical proofs. Shortly speaking, poetic sentences may be certain, but they are not true ones. To sum up, Nikonenko works hermeneutic method of interpretation of poetic texts, according to it philosophical content of poetry can be extracted only from the linguistic textual structure.

Disgraced of the West, Deserted of the East: Men in the Films Shame and Issız Adam (Alone)

Apart from being shot in almost the same decades, Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) and Issız Adam (Çağan Irmak, 2008) have other analogies that require to study on. Even though both men live in different cultures and have different relationship models, they struggle in life concurrently. While Steve McQueen’s Shame focuses on uncompromising sex addiction that overthrows a man’s life, Çağan Irmak’s Issız Adam takes it on a romantic level and presents a lonely man who cannot attach women. Though it seems an ordinary attachment problem on the surface, both men have deep social, sexual, familial problems that force them to be left alone. In consideration of adult romantic attachment theory of Hazan and Shaver (1987), both male characters will be examined under the topics of adult loneliness and love, romantic incest and sex addiction to analyze the reasons and the results of the bond that both male characters cannot have built.

Between Form and Formalization: Angus Fletcher’sThe Topological Imagination

This is a review essay of Angus Fletcher’s posthumous The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (2016). Fletcher’s guiding intuition is that topology—a vast, foundational, formally rigorous pillar of modern mathematics—can offer fresh, useful ways of seeing and thinking about our world. These novel modes of perception and cognition are, Fletcher contends, naturally anticipated by literary creation and theories of it—hence the book’s title, The Topological Imagination. Half of my essay is consequently devoted to fleshing out the larger contexts of Fletcher’s investigation: topology’s core concepts, Romantic theories of the imagination, and earlier encounters between topology and literary and philosophical thought, particularly that of Blanchot and Deleuze. The other half of this essay asks whether Fletcher’s accounts of topology and the (Romantic) imagination are accurate and compatible, and what true compatibility might look like. To answer this final question, I turn to recent debates about form and formalization and A. R. Ammons’s book-length poem, Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974).

Cloud studies as Romantic (and Realist) fragment

Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen’s meditation on the significance of the Romantic “fragment” is followed a few pages later by a passing reference to Alexander Cozens’s A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785–86). They do not elaborate on the treatise’s relevance for their argument, except to observe that Cozens’s “blots” show an early engagement with abstraction. With this off-hand citation, Zerner and Rosen present their readers with a fragment of their own. To take up and examine this rhetorical fragment is to see that Cozens plays a crucial role in Zerner and Rosen’s formulation that Romanticism and Realism are mutually constitutive, that they are expressions of the same aesthetic and social impulses. In no place is this made clearer than through Cozens’s deployment of cloud studies. A consummate expression of Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of the fragment as “a little work of art, complete and perfect in itself, and separate from the rest of the universe,” cloud studies nonetheless remain marginal to inquiries into the history of Romanticism. Most scholarship on cloud studies seeks to identify their presumptive referent, whether contemporary interest in meteorology or trends in Christian theology. Rather than proceeding from the assumption that cloud studies represent something, this article argues that this exemplary fragment illustrates Romantic (and, hence, Realist) aesthetic theory itself. What is more, this article argues that cloud studies, as theorized by Cozens, provide visual support for a new history of nineteenth-century French Realism that resolves its vexed relationship with British art.

Romantic Theories of Life: Coleridge and Shelley

Romantic Theories of Life: Coleridge and Shelley

Madame de Staël ou le plaidoyer pour une vie seconde : le théâtre

"Madame de Staël or the Necessity of a Second Life: The Theatre. Our contribution proposes an incursion into literary history at the time of the First Wave of French Romanticism. The subject of the investigation is Madame de Staël’s experimental theatre and the dramatic seasons that she organized between 1804 and 1811 in Coppet and Geneva. Our conclusions are twofold: on the aesthetic side, Coppet’s dramatic representations had the role of changing the aesthetic and literary canons of the early 19th century; on the historical side, the Coppet Group is one of the first romantic cenacles whose resounding literary activity was the theatre. Keywords: Madame de Staël, Coppet, Geneva, experimental theatre, French Romanticism, aesthetic and literary canons, 19th century literature, romantic theatre."

La Jaquerie: une tragédie romantique juste avant la « fin de l’histoire »

The Jaquerie is one of the lesser-known dramatic works of Prosper Mérimée. However, it is a very important work to understand the aesthetic and political stakes of romantic theatre on the eve of the July Revolution. The Jaquerie also helps us to understand the cul-de-sac of the theatre of French liberalism which had, however, dominated the theoretical debate about a new dramatic form during the 1830s.

A expressão, a expressividade e a performance na interseção poético-musical sob uma perspetiva multifacetada da estética artística contemporânea

Poetry and music have always been artistic expressions that intertwine since ancient times, using similar techniques to be held formally. In contemporary times, the art of music has created a romantic theory of music, mirrors the evolution of the romantic movement in its essential points, because the words are insufficient, they could not tell the ineffable, but only suggest it approximately. It is for instrumental music, music without words, convey feelings, and moods. Understanding the links between poetry and music through the melopoeticos study identifies both the points of convergences and divergences between the two arts and, thus, the study to analyze the intertwining of artistic aesthetics in musical poetry and poetic music.

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (c. 1928)

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (<i>c</i>. 1928)