Romantic Theory Research Articles

"What a Rich Fund of Images Is Treasured up Here": Poetic Commonplaces of the Sublime Universe

THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH ENLIGHTENMENT WATCHERS OF the night sky made poetry and aesthetic theory out of their Newtonian inheritance. (1) The discussion looks at eighteenth century celestial poems and at a few of the century's many theories of the sublime, including Adam Smith's essay, The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries; illustrated by the History of Astronomy. Smith's discussion was written in the 1750s, around the time that Edmund Burke wrote his Enquiry Concerning Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime, but unlike Burke, Smith does not offer a psychological argument based on an individual and inward response to the astounding appearances of visible nature. Quite differently, Smith's essay is, in part, a celebration of the Newtonian explanation of the universe with its rational abstractions from the visible, and, in part, a reply to Addison's 1712 formulation of a proto-theory of the sublime. (2) Smith's astronomy essay reproduces and explains the subjective experience of the astronomical universe as a hindrance to rationality and gives a warning about the pernicious effect of the imagination upon natural philosophy. Romanticists often focus their attention on Burke's essay when proposing the impact of theory on the poems in our field, on Kant's theory of the sublime when making sense of the grounds of thought in romantic theory, and on the sublime as an aesthetic of psychological response, but it is, I believe, worth looking at earlier eighteenth-century debates to enrich our discussion of the intentional structure of the commonplaces of sublimity. While the study of romantic landscape aesthetics and poetics has been a central theme within literary history and criticism, much less attention has been paid to the conventions of the skyscape, or more particularly, to the phenomena of the night sky: the tropes of stars and planets and comets that are ubiquitous in landscape poetry and in its predecessors, the progress poem and the prospect poem. The present essay is part of a larger project on stellar poetics, and one of the themes of that project is the affinity between the astronomical mathematics of the Newtonian synthesis and the belle-lettristic discourse of the sublime, an affinity that suggests its role in the transformations of natural philosophy into the scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the sublime took on the theological and then psychological work that had earlier been part of the domain of natural philosophers. In particular, early eighteenth century discussions of the celestial sublime offer a set of reflections on the astonishing implications of the calculus, the mathematics of both infinite and infinitesimal series that allowed for the extrapolations required for Newton's mathematic assertions that the laws of the heavens were the same laws that worked on earth. (3) The growing independence of mathematical conceptualization from other forms of knowledge offered a model of autonomous rationalities, or disciplines, while it also helped to develop the discourse of the experience of these mathematical innovations. If cosmologists and astronomers shared intellectual ground with the theorists of the Sublime, eighteenth-century poets who interpreted the night sky for imaginative ends wondered at its enormity and orderliness and were astonished not only by its sights, but also by the kind of mental abstraction demanded by natural philosophers. Witnessing the celestial sublime, the alert eighteenth century mind had to process the alien immensity of the universe in accordance with the difficulty of the concepts entailed by the new astronomy. The landscape poetry of looking, in both georgic and meditative modes, depended upon and reinforced the poet's ability to totalize and monumentalize the vista, and worked upon the assumption that there was some reciprocity between human cognition and the visual scene. For the poet of the night sky, however, who looks up, not out, the task is to totalize something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself. …

Getting at 'The Figure in the Carpet'

According to Wolfgang Iser, "The Figure in the Carpet" by Henry James is concerned with questions of the nature of literary meaning. In Iser's paradigmatic interpretation James's story juxtaposes two radically different conceptions of meaning: according to one, meaning is something to be found in the text itself and the critic's job is precisely to "dig up" that meaning. According to the other, meaning is only structured, but not contained, by the text: meaning comes into being in the very process of reading, as reader and text interact with each other. Iser thinks it is this second view of literary meaning James subscribes to. As opposed to Iser, I place the interpretation of James's story in the context of Romanticism. In this reading, it is not two different conceptions of meaning that James juxtaposes, but two different modes of reading. One, exemplified by the narrator of the story, is superficial, journalistic, and platitudinous; the other, represented by Corvick and Gwendolyn, is passionate and profound and reflects James's own Romantic theory of reading. I also analyze a number of different theoretical texts by James, thus attempting to work out a more convincing hermeneutic fore-structure for interpreting the story than that of Iser's.

Romantic and Revolutionary Theatre, 1789–1860. Edited by Donald Roy. Compiled and introduced by Victor Emeljanow, Kenneth Richards, and Laura Richards. Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 558. $130 cloth.

I was introduced to sourcebooks as an undergraduate in the 1960s. At that time, the most frequently used were A. M. Nagler's A Sourcebook in Theatrical History (1952), Toby Cole's Directors on Directing (1963), and Toby Cole and Helen Chinoy's Actors on Acting (1948). These books first introduced me to the process of theatre history, and as I believe it is important to introduce this process to students, I continued to use both Nagler and the Cole and Chinoy volume, which was expanded in 1970, in teaching theatre history.

The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836-1838

Sir Francis Bond Head (1793-1875) was a respected man of letters and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada from January 1836 until March 1838. During that time he proposed to remove local Anishinaabeg peoples from their traditional territories in present-day southern Ontario and relocate them to Manitoulin Island. This article explores how Head used Romantic notions that exalted primitivism and the “noble savage” to justify this plan. In so doing it clarifies the relationship between European Romantic theory and Canadian colonial practice in the early nineteenth century. A careful analysis of Head’s Indian policy reveals that many Romantic perceptions of Aboriginal peoples, while seemingly benevolent, were consistent with colonial policies that sought to alienate Aboriginal peoples from their lands and to segregate them from contact with European settler societies

Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs.Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Jane Moody.The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789-1805. George Taylor.

Previous articleNext article No AccessWomen in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Jane Moody. The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789-1805. George Taylor.Edward ZiterEdward Ziter Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 35, Number 4Autumn 2004Review Issue Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045088 Views: 2Total views on this site © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The romantic and transcendental quests of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Victor-Marie Hugo

Intersecting universes - Emerson, Hugo and Zeitgest of 19th-century America and if I had a barn-fowl ... I should name him France - Emerson's romantic the marriage of thoughts and things - romantic theory of correspondence in poet in Emerson and Hugo the religion of - Emerson's and Hugo's pantheistic poetics of love conclusion appendix.

Romantic and revolutionary theatre, 1789-1860

Romantic and revolutionary theatre, 1789-1860

Seeing Things ("As They Are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance

1 COLERIDGE IS NOT BEST KNOWN AS A PLAYWRIGHT, OR EVEN AS A THEORIST of the stage, in spite of his sustained critical assessment of late eighteenth-century theater--itself familiar to readers chiefly through his lectures on Shakespeare (this is to gesture toward the alleged anti-theatricality of his general position). Nevertheless, Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely, it seems, in response to the abysmal state of English drama in the 1790s, as it was then perceived not only by Coleridge but by other public commentators as well, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Contemporary plays were often dismissed as sentimental, gothic, formulaic, and highly melodramatic--or, as Wordsworth famously declared in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, sickly and stupid german tragedies. These comments need to be understood in terms of highly idealized sense of what theater could accomplish, in political as well as dramatic terms. To reinvigorate the productions of the English stage would be not only to elevate it again to the level of its golden age, in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but to fulfill an agenda related to nationalist impulse that, if not explicitly revolutionary, was politically reformist. (1) Thus the familiar narrative of Coleridge's involvement in the theater begins with his early radicalism (evident in so much of his work in the 1790s, not least in his 1797 play Osorio, and in The Fall of Robespierre, co-written with Robert Southey), and with sense of the theater as an ideal space not only to represent and engage current events (chiefly of course the French Revolution and the English reaction to it, and with it, issues of freedom and censorship), but also to educate the public response to those events. On the other hand, the political ambivalence of Coleridge's maturity, and the critical pronouncements he would later make on the state of the theater, did nothing to counter the general sense that highbrow Romantic theater was either fixated unproductively on old models (classical or Shakespearean), or obsessed by subjects that were fundamentally unsuitable for the stage--fit only for the closet, or specimens of what Byron was to call mental theater. (2) It is in this loosely-sketched context, though, that we may now consider the following event. In 1813, Coleridge's play Remorse, highly successful revision of his 1797 play Osorio, was performed to considerable acclaim, and ran for nearly three weeks at Drury Lane. As far and away the most financially rewarding production of Coleridge's career (he is thought to have made 400 pounds out of it), this turn of events was remarkable enough. But more remarkable still, though rarely mentioned in discussions of Coleridge's theory of dramatic illusion, is how play, written by such an adamant critic of Georgian stage-craft could unreservedly accept and deploy its conventions. (3) The paradox here draws from Coleridge's assertion that while Shakespeare's stage was effectively bare--merely a naked room, blanket for curtain--his appeal to the imagination fitted it out as 'A field for monarchs.' (4) Theater productions of Coleridge's day, on the other hand, including those of Shakespeare's plays, appealed not to the imagination, but to the senses, through an emphasis on visual display and special effects, and were thus deemed inappropriate not only for Shakespeare's genius, but for any serious drama. Meanwhile, the 1813 production of Coleridge's own play, at the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was state of the art: the theater itself had been re-equipped with the latest in lighting and stage technology, and for Remorse, there were to be lavish sets and startling effects, in keeping with the kind of exotic popular fashion created by Byron's Eastern tales (Holmes 321, 325). The play may have been vilified by many critics for its awkward emphasis on description in place of action (what we might construe as an emphasis on the written over the visual) and for its attendant abstractions, but it was unanimously appreciated for its stage effects, and particularly for the coup d'oeil of the famous sorcery scene. …

Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage by Misty G. Anderson (review)

170 Reviews unsurprisingly, 'Signs of Pope are nowhere' (p. 40). At its most worrying, we find a sequence of neat misreadings of eighteenth-century texts, enabled by a sequence of subtle misquotations. This process begins with Vermeule's account ofJoseph Wright of Derby's painting Three Persons Viewing 'The Gladiator' by Candlelight, where it simply strains the evidence of our own eyes to claim that 'the rationalist elder statesman or merchant [. . .] has arranged his two hands in a pose that mimics that of the gladiator', so that the discussion can, through comparing the significance of hands, conclude that the painting is 'an allegory ofthe ways thatpeople resist each other's pressures' (p. 26). His gloss on Pope's 1705 letterto Wycherley, too, does not quite reflectwhat Pope actually wrote; on the contrary, Pope seems to be going out of his way not to call Wycherley 'a tree past bearing' (p. 76). Again, in his sequence of remarks on acting, during the Hume phase of the book, Vermeule quotes Lichtenberg's description of Garrick playing Hamlet. Here he turns Lichtenberg's observation of the audience's silent anticipation of the appearance of the Ghost, 'as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre', into their 'awareness' ofthe actor's 'tricks' simply by citing the line after the description of Garrick's 'prolonged backward stagger' when the Ghost does appear (p. 175). The letterhas ample material to allow for discussion of naturalism and artifice without thus slanting the evidence. The book is not without interest, or ingenuity, or range, or learning, but it is oddly conducted and often oddly stated, as oddly, for example, as this conclusion to Vermeule's long chapter on the Life of Savage: In the introduction to this book, I proposed that Johnson's text raises certain questions about the moral life: What can we do to be more moral? [. . .] Johnson's exploration of the limits of sympathy and moral command delivers good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is nothing special we can do to be moral; the good news is that as reciprocal altruists we already are moral. (p. 153) University of Northumbria at Newcastle Allan Ingram Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. By Misty G. Anderson. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 262pp. ?35. ISBN 0-312-23938. Misty Anderson offers close readings of the popular comedies of Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, and Inchbald, tracing their comic strategies as they respond to changes in marriage law. She draws attention to the inconsistency between comic events manipulated by the heroines and comedy's final closure of marriage, in which the identity of women is subsumed into that of their husbands. Feminist criticism has found comedy a rich source for the exposure of inequities in the lives of women, and Anderson's work complements Audrey Bilger's examination of female comedy in the novels of Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen (LaughingFeminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998)), and the work on nineteenth-century women dramatists by Catherine Burroughs (Closet Stages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977) and (ed.) Womenin British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, iygo-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)), Ellen Donkin, and Tracy Davis (Women and Play writing in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)). However, Anderson emphasizes that her readings show these dramatists exploiting comedy's potential for dissenting points of view that 'do not entail radicalism' (p. 203). MLR, 99.1, 2004 171 Two introductory chapters lay the foundations for her readings. The firstgives a chronological account of theories of comedy, a narrative spanning Aristotle to Northrop Frye and beyond, wittily branded 'a shaggy dog story'. Anderson's own work is set in the context of the feminist 'insights' of Barreca, Walker, and Gillooly; and introduces the theories of comedy of her four subjects. Her second chapter documents marriage and contract law and relevant cases in the period, acknowledging Susan Staves's work as providing the iegal framework' (Susan Staves, Married Women's...

Post-Romantic Ideologies and Victorian Poetic Practice, or, the Future of Criticism at the Present Time

By most accounts, professional academic scholarship in English grew out of Victorian literary ideology, especially out of what Gerald Graft lightly calls cultural tradition in the Matthew Arnold sense. (1) Historically, such accounts have tended to treat nineteenth-century theory in isolation from actual practice. Future criticism on Victorian poetics, though, seems likely to reshape our sense of cultural tradition, not least by demonstrating the complexity of the relation between nineteenth-century literary ideology and praxis. As I argue below, the development of online scholarly resources and scholars' growing interest in formerly marginal texts both presently lead in this direction, and their development will increasingly show how far ideologies and practices determined one another. The relation between specifically Victorian ideology and practice has been undertheorized, especially the contemporary practice of using to denote both a kind of and an index of artistic achievement. To distinguish between and mere verse is to accept one of the more abstruse parts of the Romantic legacy. But most Victorians did so, just as they used poetic to describe prose, painting, or sculpture. (Anna Jameson's The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art [1846], for instance, instructs readers in Renaissance painting but never, to my recollection, discusses actual poems.) It is an important part of the Victorian legacy that its diction systematically blurs the distinction between form and artistic value despite the fact that Victorian critics increasingly felt compelled to distinguish between them. Consider the case of George Henry Lewes from among the many mid-century Victorians who tried to rethink this conflation of poetry and artistic value. In 1865, Lewes assumed the editorship of a new journal, the Fortnightly Review, and in its opening issue began his Principles of Success in a series of articles that promised to reconsider Victorian truisms about and its production. Rather than recycling cliches, Lewes pledged to address Literature, in its widest sense. (2) Not only did he wish to say something new, but he depended upon the newness of what he said to help launch the Fortnightly. He had also personal reasons for wanting to do so, for, as George Eliot's partner, he was keenly interested in the rising status of the novel in Victorian literary culture. (3) In the Fortnightly's initial number, then, Lewes adheres to the term literature to discuss the highly unstable and shifting ground of mid-century aesthetics. Where his Romantic predecessors took for granted the conflation of art and poetry, Lewes keeps himself to such generic terms as books, authors, works, and and he specifies that he means novels and essays as well as dramas and poetry. Yet as early as the second issue, Lewes begins to abandon these distinctions, and uses poet for artist in almost half his references to literary writers, or else he reflexively and tautologically combines them, as in his claim that Vigorous and effective minds habitually deal with concrete images. This is notably the case with and literates (p. 46). Even if in such phrases poets are understood to be distinct from great literates, Lewes implies their equivalence or interchangeability. In 1865, such a claim would be scarcely imaginable were novelists or essayists substituted for poets, for among the arts, only poetry had an evaluative sense as well as a generic one. Romantic texts like Hegel's Aesthetics--a major source of Lewes's ideas--take for granted poetry's status as the crown of art. But Lewes's approach indicates the theoretical force and unwieldiness of in the mid century more clearly than Hegel's, because he resolutely challenges this dominant model before succumbing to its idiom. The force of highbrow Romantic theory tended both to shape Victorian practice and to circumscribe unrelated intellectual ventures. …

Reviews: Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–45., Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910., the Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre, 1900–1940., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840

Reviews: Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–45., Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910., the Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre, 1900–1940., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840

Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (review)

The blurbs on the back of this book champion Walter Benjamin's "intimate debate with the origin and legacy of German Romanticism." Benjamin engaged with German Romanticism early in his writing career, and his work, Michael Jennings proclaims, "offers the most important extended examination of German Romanticism yet produced." Inside the book's covers, however, a rather different story is told. Many contributors to this collection of writings on Benjamin's youthful encounter with Romanticism attest to his sloppy scholarship and mistaken grasp of philosophy. Winfried Menninghaus, in "Walter Benjamin's Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflection," castigates Benjamin's "extremely 'free' treatments of quoted material" and observes "significant limitations to and falsifications within his exposition of the concept of reflection" (19). More charitably, Menninghaus observes the dearth of published primary texts available to Benjamin, which, had they been obtainable, might have allowed his analyses to be less partial and better informed (26). Rodolphe Gasché concurs, in "The Sober Absolute: Walter [End Page 779] Benjamin and the Early Romantics." Benjamin's exegeses of aspects of Romantic thought are "essentially limited and distorted," and the semantics of selected fragments are either "consciously perverted or forced in certain directions" (51). Anthony Phelan, in his contribution "Fortgang and Zusammenhang: Walter Benjamin and the Romantic Novel," identifies "sleights of hand in Benjamin's argument" (69), and suggests that it is an "unkindness" to "overtax this early research as the conscious groundwork of his later thought" (69). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe labels Benjamin's doctoral work on Romanticism a "compromise" between an academic dissertation and a "proper" book, fundamentally scuppered by Benjamin's "hostility" to the university and its conventions (10). And so it goes on; critical assessments and even frustration are expressed on the part of those scholars who stunningly demonstrate here their formidable knowledge of Romantic philosophical and aesthetic thought. The Benjamin-dissing subsides in the latter section of the book titled "Beyond Early Romanticism: Benjamin, Hölderlin, Goethe." Here four essays investigate Benjamin's weighty literary analyses of Hölderlin and Goethe. Benjamin's literary-aesthetic investigations appear to be on firmer ground, and studies of them here by Beatrice Hanssen, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, David Ferris and Sigrid Weigel excavate much of political, poetical and critical value.

The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security by Seán Allan, and: Gewagte Experimente and kühne Konstellationen: Kleists Werk zwischen Klassizismus und Romantik ed. by Christine Lubkoll, Günter Oesterle (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1045 systematic comments on rhetoric negotiates shifting terminology and complex inter? play between a wide variety of sources and Schlegel'sexperimental ideas. His finding that Schlegel's concept of rhetoric remained ambiguous and in essence 'unrhetorical' is convincing, and Schlegel's work thus appears to support the generally accepted view that 1800 marks the death of rhetoric proper not only in German literature. The second part is curiously disconnected from the first,since Schlegel, while implicitly acting as the sole representative of Romanticism, now recedes from view. Al? though Krause here purports to deal with 'Rhetorikund Romantik', he in fact reaches back into the classics and deals with the whole of the eighteenth century in an admirably differentiateddiscussion ofmanifold strands ofthe tradition. By viewing early Romanticism as marking 'the end of histories of rhetoric in the eighteenth century', however, Krause simplifies the rhetorical tradition at the point where it becomes par? ticularly complex: in the variety ofworks across the spectrum of Romantic theory and literature well into the nineteenth century. 11is certainly the case that by 1800, classical rhetoric had been significantlyweakened by the disappearance of Latin fromuniversi? ties and schools, by reconfigurationsof academic disciplines, and by the rationalist and idealist traditions in philosophy. Looking beyond 1800, it is true that the very concept of rhetoric is called into question when Hans Blumenberg or Paul de Man identi? fies one small component, namely metaphor and related tropes, with the discipline itself,and divests that component of its functional role. Yet their interest in rhetoric, founded in part on Nietzsche's vigorous engagement with tradition, is more than just the twitching of a severed limb. If rhetoric is regarded as founded in language and speech rather than specifically in Greek and Latin, ifits relationship with philosophy is acknowledged to have been both co-operative and competitive since classical times, and if rhetoric is seen throughout its history to sustain manifold tensions between theory and practice, then the notion of its demise around 1800 ceases to be persuasive. Tantalizingly, Krause concludes by highlighting the importance of Romanticism for a continuity of sorts, suggesting that the Romantics facilitated both the transfor? mation of rhetoric into literature and subsequent reflection on rhetoricity. Yet the mechanisms of such processes fail to come into focus, not least because Krause hardly comments on the interaction between Schlegel's theoretical writings and those of his fellow Romantics, or the role of rhetoric in their literary practice. Moreover, he ignores a contemporary such as Kleist, whose work would show rhetoric to be alive and kickingeven around 1800. Nevertheless, the achievement of this study should not be underestimated, for it addresses issues central to the changing role of rhetoric in the eighteenth century and beyond. By focusing on the disintegration of rhetoric under the impact of philo? sophy in works that helped to shape the Romantic agenda, Peter Krause illuminates the importance of ancient disputes forthe constitution of modern literary theory,and explores immensely varied strands in a tradition that is too often viewed as monolithic. Jesus College, Oxford Katrin Kohl The Stories ofHeinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security. By SeAn Allan. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2001. x + 243pp. ?45; $65. ISBN 1-57113-227-9 (hbk). Gewagte Experimente and kuhne Konstellationen: Kleists Werk zwischen Klassizismus undRomantik. Ed. by Christine LuBKOLLand Gunter Oesterle. (Stiftungfiir Romantikforschung, 12) Wiirzburg: Konighausen & Neumann. 2001. 333 pp. ?35. ISBN 3-8260-1862-1 (pbk). Following his 1997 study of Kleist's plays, Sean Allan now turns to the novellas and the 'fictions ofsecurity' they develop. Arguing that 'the behaviour ofthe characters can 1046 Reviews be properly understood only ifseen in the light of their respective societies' (p. 217), Allan groups seven texts into four thematic categories: justice and revenge {Michael Kohlhaas, Der Zweikampf), revolution and social change {Das Erdbeben in Chili, Die Verlobungin St. Domingo), the nature of evil {Der Findling, Die Marquise von O . . .), and art and religion {Die heilige Cacilie oder die Gewalt der Musik). If Das Bettelweib von Locarno is excluded because it is untypical, Cacilie is included precisely because it is so difficultto integrate into Kleist's oeuvre as a whole, yet 'in its insistence on the...

A Higher Language: Novalis on Communion with Animals

Around 1800 Philipp Otto Runge fashioned with scissors and paper a dog gazing up at a full moon. Significantly, the dog holds his mouth closed, as if, were he to howl, we might think him a wolf in the wild. Instead he is a domesticated dog, to the point that he even communicates human value: like a true Romantic, he raises his eyes silently to the sky, his chest filled with a longing for transcendence. Art critic Robert Rosenblum has written that the silhouette portrays a strangely haunting opposition between terrestrial desire and skyborne inaccessibility (37). A decade before C. D. Friedrich's nocturnal back figures, Runge creates a dog transfixed by lunar light. This substitution of a dog for this archetypal Romantic pose is fascinating. How is it that the dog can be emblematic for human longing? Does it mean that animals share in mankind's intimations of a higher being or immortality? Or is the anthropomorphism more mundane, announcing the sentimentalization of the pet seen later in Victorian England? Here, the animal undoubtedly represents neither the human trait that Enlightenment thinkers conventionally denied it (i.e., reason), nor does the dog represent the feature that the nineteenth century frequently claimed humans and animals shared (i.e., a baser instinct). The dog is not an animal in a fairy tale waiting to be retransfigured into a human being and thereby saved from a beast's existence. Nor is he a talking animal who has stepped out of a fable to depict human frailties. Instead the dog possesses a kind of spirituality, a sense of awe. His transfixed gaze suggests a bond with a transcendent world; perhaps his chest breathes in oneness with nature. Even in the sparseness of the silhouette (or perhaps because of the evocative sublimity of its shorthand), Runge points to the mysterious interconnectedness of nature. all of nature is sacred and alive, a unity in which the dog participates. I should like to argue that this particular substitution of animal for human occurs not insignificantly in Romanticism, and that Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) was a major thinker in realigning the relationship between the two worlds. Of course, much scholarship has been devoted to nature, galvanism, and mineralogy in Novalis's writings.1 To be sure, there are fewer and less salient references to animals than to plants and stones in his work. But what passages exist are extraordinary for their contradiction of the Enlightenment delineation of the boundaries between man and animal. If much Enlightenment thought set out to define the essence of man, then his uniqueness was often purported at the expense of nonhuman creatures. Even in writers such as Condillac and Reimarus who elaborated on the similarities between beast and man, man always crowned the continuity and development from one species to the next. Novalis, by contrast, conceives of an almost instantaneous, imaginative transformation of man into an animal, plant, or stone. At one stroke, he casts aside the hierarchy that governed the eighteenth-century belief in the Great Chain of Being. The metamorphosis itself signifies a state of higher consciousness that transcends the human. Even more audaciously, Hardenberg asks whether God, since he could become man, could not also become a stone, plant, animal, or element, thereby instating eine fortwahrende Erlosung in der Natur (2:826). In short, instead of the animal being the abject Other of Enlightenment thought, it becomes the of Novalis's radical pre-Rimbaudian statement: Ich bin Du (2:332). The question then arises as to what permits this shift in intellectual history, one that involves philosophy, theology, and science. Could one perhaps search for an answer in central Romantic tenets, even if they appear at first glance to be far removed from the question of what distinguishes man from beast? In other words, do the Romantic theories on the fragment, organicity, chaos, pre-reflexive being, and poesis pertain or even contribute to this striking shift? …

Are There Rationally Undecidable Arguments?

Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the sciences of life

Preface Illustrations Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Myths of Community in the Lyrical Ballads 1798-1998: The Commonwealth and the Constitution 3. The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism 4. Jews, Jubilee, and Harringtonianism in Coleridge and Maria Edgeworth: Republican Conversions 5. Coleridge and 'the Oran utan hypothesis': Romantic Theories of Race 6. Theorizing Golgotha: Coleridge, Race Theory, and the Skull Beneath the Skin 7. Kubla Khan and the Theory of the Earth 8. Coleridge's Abstruse Researches 9. Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley 10. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein 11. Coleridge's 'Hymn before Sun-rise' and the Voice Not Heard 12. Coleridge and the End of Autonomy 13. Historicist Readings of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 14. Coleridge's Secret Ministry: Historical Reading and Editorial Theory 15. How Shall We Write the Life of Coleridge? Contributors Index

Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, 1790-1840 (review)

Theatre has always represented a curious loophole for ambitious women. It is multi-faceted as an art form, and consequently has many component tasks. This adds up to both more surface area and greater permeability. Women emerge in Catherine Burroughs's distinguished collection as performers, playwrights, managers, critics, and translators in the theatre of the Romantic Period. There is a canny resilience to the way they position themselves in and about theatre and also to how they disappear from the premises when the scrutiny turns hostile. Or, in extraordinary moments, they stand their ground. In an essay by Katherine Newey, we are asked to see women's work in the theatre of this period as part of a dialectical process, a live discussion in which they were speaking back to their culture and shaping it even as they threaded their way through its judgments and restrictions. A palpable sense of women mobilizing themselves through theatre into the public space of debate underpins this entire book, giving it vitality and freshness. We have passed the point of recovery; we know from the accumulated work of scholars over the past two decades who these women were. We are now in a position to try to understand what they were saying.

Women in British Romantic theatre: drama, performance, and society, 1790-1840

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: uncloseting women in British Romantic theatre Catherine Burroughs Part I. Historical Contexts: Revolution and Entrenchment: 1. Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: gender, power and politics in the theatre of Romanticism Jeffrey N. Cox 2. Reviewing women in British Romantic theatre Greg Kucich Part II. Nations, Households, Dramaturgy: 3. Women and history on the Romantic stage: More, Yearsley, Burney and Mitford Katherine Newey 4. English national identity in Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace: India, abolition and the rights of women Jeanne Moskal 5. Women's sovereignty on trial: Joanna Baillie's comedy The Tryal as metatheatrics Marjean D. Purinton Part III. Performance and Closet Drama: 6. Outing Joanna Baillie Susan Bennett 7. The management of laughter: Jane Scott's Camilla the Amazon in 1998 Jacky Bratton and Gilli Bush-Bailey Part IV. Criticism and Theory: 8. Elizabeth Inchbald: a woman critic in her theatrical culture Marvin Carlson 9. Authorial performances in the criticism and theory of Romantic women playwrights Thomas C. Crochunis Part V. Translation, Adaptation, Revision: 10. Suicide and translation in the dramaturgy of Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne Plumptre Jane Moody 11. Remaking love: remorse in the theatre of Baillie and Inchbald Julie Carlson Bibliography Index.

Women in British Romantic Theater: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. Edited by Catherine Burroughs.

<i>Women in British Romantic Theater: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840</i>. Edited by Catherine Burroughs.

Wordsworth's Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production

Introduction 1. Description: picturesque aesthetics and the production of the English Middle Class, 1730-1798 2. Instruction: romantic theories of elemental and cultural literacy and the Lyrical Ballads 3. Vocation: automimesis and the political economy of spirit and body in The Prelude Notes Bibliography Index.