The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism

The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism PDF Author: Mark Canuel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192895303
Category : Romanticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about progress and perfection? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement--increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury--they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley's plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The majestic edifices of Wordsworth's imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are republican or pious, not to mention the recalcitrant enthusiast who is the poet himself.

The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism

The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism PDF Author: Mark Canuel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192895303
Category : Romanticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about progress and perfection? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement--increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury--they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley's plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The majestic edifices of Wordsworth's imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are republican or pious, not to mention the recalcitrant enthusiast who is the poet himself.

Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism

Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism PDF Author: Nicholas Mason
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409984
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Important revisions to the history of advertising and its connection to Romantic-era literature. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism investigates the entwined histories of the advertising industry and the gradual commodification of literature over the course of the Romantic Century (1750–1850). In this engaging and detailed study, Nicholas Mason argues that the seemingly antagonistic arenas of marketing and literature share a common genealogy and, in many instances, even a symbiotic relationship. Drawing from archival materials such as publishers' account books, merchants' trade cards, and authors' letters, Mason traces the beginnings of many familiar modern advertising methods—including product placement, limited-time offers, and journalistic puffery—to the British book trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until now, Romantic scholars have not fully recognized advertising’s cultural significance or the importance of this period in the origins of modern advertising. Mason explores Lord Byron’s appropriation of branding, Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s experiments in visual marketing, and late-Romantic debates over advertising's claim to be a new branch of the literary arts. Mason uses the antics of Romantic-era advertising to illustrate the profound implications of commercial modernity, both in economic practices governing the book trade and, more broadly, in the development of the modern idea of literature.

The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism

The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism PDF Author: Jonathan Sachs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108352278
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Anxieties about decline were a prominent feature of British public discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These anxieties were borne out repeatedly in books and periodicals, pamphlets and poems. Tracing the reciprocal development of Romantic-era Britain's rapidly expanding literary and market cultures through the lens of decline, Jonathan Sachs offers a fresh way of understanding British Romanticism. The book focuses on three aspects of literary experience - questions of value, the fascination with ruins, and the representation of slow time - to explore how shifting conceptions of progress and change inform a post-enlightenment sense of cultural decline. Combining close readings of Romantic literary texts with an examination of works from political economy, historical writing, classical studies, and media history the book reveals for the first time how anxieties about decline impacted literary form and shaped Romantic debates about poetry and the meaning of literature.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Maureen N. McLane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism PDF Author: Stuart Curran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A fully updated edition of this popular Companion, with two new essays reflecting new developments in the field.

The Roots of Romanticism

The Roots of Romanticism PDF Author: Isaiah Berlin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691086620
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind PDF Author: Alan Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139428519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Richardson breaks new ground in two fields, revealing a significant and undervalued facet of British Romanticism while demonstrating the 'Romantic' character of early neuroscience. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct and intuition, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the era, take on unsuspected valences that transform conventional accounts of Romantic cultural history. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.

Romantic Egypt

Romantic Egypt PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Fay
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793635684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Romantic Egypt: Abyssal Ground of British Romanticism traces the historical, cultural and intellectual affiliations between Ancient Egypt and Romantic-period Britain and Germany, including the influences contributed by European thought, politics, and interventions such as Napoleon’s 1799 Egyptian Campaign. Until the contributions of Napoleon’s expedition to scientific knowledge of Ancient Egyptian monuments and ruins, Egypt had been largely swathed in mystical explanations of its past, its achievements, its beliefs, and its cultural importance; however, the increased knowledge about Ancient Egypt competed with the allure of a more mythically imbued antiquity in the Romantic imagination. Romantic Egypt argues that this balance between knowing and not-knowing, between deciphering and imagining a golden-age Egypt, between enlightened thought and mysticism, was essential to the development of the Romantic imaginary because, for the Romantics, western philosophy and art had their birth in the all-but-lost wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

Additions to the Rhaeto-Romantic Collection

Additions to the Rhaeto-Romantic Collection PDF Author: Cornell University. Libraries
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Raeto-Romance philology
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description


History of British Commerce and of the Economic Progress of the British Nation 1763-1870

History of British Commerce and of the Economic Progress of the British Nation 1763-1870 PDF Author: Leone Levi
Publisher: London, Murray
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description