Author: Steven Knapp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book
Book Description
Eighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions "sublime." This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people--or, worse, turning people into ideas. In this wide-ranging, carefully argued study, Steven Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime. Personifications, such as Milton's controversial figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, were seen to embody a unique combination of imaginative power and overt fictionality, and these, Knapp shows, were exactly the conflicting requirements of the sublime in general. He argues that the uneasiness readers felt toward sublime personifications was symptomatic of broader ambivalences toward archaic beliefs, political and religious violence, and poetic fiction as such. Drawing on recent interpretations of Romanticism, allegory, and the sublime, Knapp provides important new readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant, and William Collins. His provocative thesis sheds new light on the relationship between Romanticism and the eighteenth century.
Author: Ross Greig Woodman
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773508989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book
Book Description
Seven professors of literature in Canadian universities contribute essays that examine English authors of the Romantic movement using historical, textual, and deconstructive methodologies. Studies of Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, are augmented by a review of recent scholarship. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: James J. Paxson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521445396
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book
Book Description
Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man has given it still greater prominence as 'the master trope of poetic discourse'. James Paxson here offers a much-needed critical and theoretical appraisal of personification in the light of poststructuralist thought and theory. The poetics of personification provides a historical reassessment of early theories, together with a sustained account of how literary personification works through an examination of narratological and semiotic codes and structures in the allegorical texts of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. The device turns out to be anything but an aberration, oddity or barbarism, from ancient, medieval or early modern literature. Rather, it works as a complex artistic tool for revealing and advertising the problems and limits inherent in narration in particular and poetic or verbal creation in general.
Author: Craig R. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527592928
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Get Book
Book Description
Relying on the author’s established expertise in rhetoric and political communication, this book re-contextualizes Romantic rhetorical theory from the late 18th and early 19th centuries to provide a foundation for a Neo-Romantic rhetorical theory for our own time. In the process, it uses a unique methodology to correct misconceptions about the rhetorical theories of many writers. Using a dialectical approach, the early chapters trace Romanticism through its opposition to the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment, back through Humanism and its opposition to Scholasticism, to its roots in St. Augustine’s writing. These chapters include a revisionist analysis of the church’s treatment of Galileo in the course of showing how difficult it was for scientific study to be accepted in Scholastic circles. The study goes on to argue that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Edmund Burke were bridge figures to the Romantic Era. This move throws new light on exemplary painters, composers, writers and orators of the Romantic Era, who are examined in chapters eight and nine. Chapter ten focuses on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his development of the rhetorical poem, and thereby provides a new genre in the Romantic catalogue. Chapter Eleven turns to the Romantic rhetorical theories of Hugh Blair and Thomas De Quincey to empower those seeking to save the environment. The concluding chapter then synthesizes their theories with relevant contemporary rhetorical theories thereby constructing a Neo-Romantic theory for our own time. In the process, the book links the Romantics’ love of nature to the current environmental crisis.
Author: Mary A. Favret
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book
Book Description
What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today. Favret examines wartime literature and art as varied as meditations on the Iliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, and popular poetry in newspapers and periodicals; she locates the embedded sense of war and dislocation in works ranging from Austen, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to Woolf, Stevens, and Sebald; and she contemplates how literature provides the public with methods for responding to violent calamities happening elsewhere. Bringing to light Romanticism's legacy in reflections on modern warfare, this book shows that war's absent presence affects home in deep and irrevocable ways.
Author: Barbara Johnson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801837456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book
Book Description
New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man.
Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452904887
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Brad Pasanek
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421416891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Get Book
Book Description
A pathbreaking introduction to eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind that recasts the grand narrative of the Enlightenment in terms of its tropes and figures. An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire’s classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek’s massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics. Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories—Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and Writing—Pasanek maps out constellations of metaphors. He frames his collection of literary excerpts in each section with a more descriptive and theoretical discussion of what he calls “desultory reading,” a form of unsystematic perusal of writing frequently employed by Enlightenment thinkers. By surveying the printed past alongside the digital present, the book treats eighteenth-century writing as its topic while essentially exemplifying its rhetorical approach. More than an exercise in quotation, this intellectual history offers illuminating readings of fragmentary literary works and confrontations with neoclassical and contemporary theories of metaphor. The book’s entries complicate received ideas about Locke’s blank slate, question M. H. Abrams’ claims about mirrors and lamps, and chart changing frequencies of metal metaphors in a moment of industrial revolution. The book also responds to current anxieties about reading and the mass digitization of literature, touching on recent discussions of “distant reading,” “shallow reading,” and “surface reading.” Promoting critical and creative anachronism, Metaphors of Mind redefines the notion of an archive in the age of Amazon and Google Books.
Author: Gary Lee Harrison
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814324813
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book
Book Description
William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.
Author: G. Gabrielle Starr
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421419114
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Get Book
Book Description
Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.
