Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, HistoryStanford University Press, 2000 - 227 ページ Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of ?imagination in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological?an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical?a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations. The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins's odes figure Scotland as the site of a ?superstitious poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind's projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts. Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt's political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt's enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics. The final sections of the book engage Shelley's complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets ?unacknowledged legislators, suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly ?historical action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between ?superstition, ?imagination, and ?history in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism. |
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... Allegorical Imperative , " in Studies in Romanticism 34 ( spring 1995 ) . My thanks to the trustees of Boston University for permission to present a revised version here . D.E.W. Introduction Contents I 1. Superstitions of Enlightenment ...
... Allegorical Imperative , " in Studies in Romanticism 34 ( spring 1995 ) . My thanks to the trustees of Boston University for permission to present a revised version here . D.E.W. Introduction Contents I 1. Superstitions of Enlightenment ...
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... allegory and symbol , and so forth — exemplify such identity- effects , as does text and context . They are given so as to dissemble giving , instituting the grounds for interpretations that are , in effect , mis- ( or missed ) readings ...
... allegory and symbol , and so forth — exemplify such identity- effects , as does text and context . They are given so as to dissemble giving , instituting the grounds for interpretations that are , in effect , mis- ( or missed ) readings ...
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... allegorical distance — as that which can no longer be believed.11 Given the absence of authentic belief , however , the question remains whether literary language should not be altogether purified of its " founding superstitions ...
... allegorical distance — as that which can no longer be believed.11 Given the absence of authentic belief , however , the question remains whether literary language should not be altogether purified of its " founding superstitions ...
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... allegory , Canto I enables one to remark the partly fictive status of its " internaliza- tions " —to ( re ) install ... allegory of eagle and snake caught in an eternal battle refigures its lines of demarcation as the product of ongoing ...
... allegory , Canto I enables one to remark the partly fictive status of its " internaliza- tions " —to ( re ) install ... allegory of eagle and snake caught in an eternal battle refigures its lines of demarcation as the product of ongoing ...
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... allegory dic- tated as much by institutional as intellectual exigencies . Something still remains to be said , however , about the intellec- tual effects of institutional exigencies in this particular instance . Through what may ...
... allegory dic- tated as much by institutional as intellectual exigencies . Something still remains to be said , however , about the intellec- tual effects of institutional exigencies in this particular instance . Through what may ...
多く使われている語句
action aesthetic allegory appears argument articulation Benjamin canto catachresis chapter claims Collins Collins's poetry consciousness context critical critique Defence of Poetry Derrida didacticism différance difference discourse disinterest edited effect emphasis England English Enlightenment Essay ethical evil example Fancy feel figure future Harold Bloom Historicism human ideal identity ideology imagination implications insofar interest interpretation Jacques Derrida language Levinas linguistic literal literary literature Lycidas means mediate mind Mont Blanc moral morning star narrative nation never object once original Oxford passage past Percy Bysshe Shelley philosophical poem poet poetic political position possibility present prose Punishment of Death question quoted readers reading reference referential reflection remains Revolt of Islam rhetoric Romantic Romanticism Scotland Scottish self-interest sense Shelley Shelley's spirit structure superstition temporal thematic things Thomas Love Peacock thou thought tion traces translated trope turn University Press Walter Benjamin William Hazlitt words writing