Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity

Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity PDF Author: Michael Löwy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082238129X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Romanticism is a worldview that finds expression over a whole range of cultural fields—not only in literature and art but in philosophy, theology, political theory, and social movements. In Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre formulate a theory that defines romanticism as a cultural protest against modern bourgeois industrial civilization and work to reveal the unity that underlies the extraordinary diversity of romanticism from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. After critiquing previous conceptions of romanticism and discussing its first European manifestations, Löwy and Sayre propose a typology of the sociopolitical positions held by romantic writers-from “restitutionist” to various revolutionary/utopian forms. In subsequent chapters, they give extended treatment to writers as diverse as Coleridge and Ruskin, Charles Peguy, Ernst Bloch and Christa Wolf. Among other topics, they discuss the complex relationship between Marxism and romanticism before closing with a reflection on more contemporary manifestations of romanticism (for example, surrealism, the events of May 1968, and the ecological movement) as well as its future. Students and scholars of literature, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies will be interested in this elegant and thoroughly original book.

Romanticism and Modernity

Romanticism and Modernity PDF Author: Thomas Pfau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131797865X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Though traditionally defined as a relatively brief time period - typically the half century of 1780-1830 - the "Romantic era" constitutes a crucial, indeed unique, transitional phase in what has come to be called "modernity," for it was during these fifty years that myriad disciplinary, aesthetic, economic, and political changes long in the making accelerated dramatically. Due in part to the increased velocity of change, though, most of modernity’s essential master-tropes - such as secularization, instrumental reason, individual rights, economic self-interest, emancipation, system, institution, nation, empire, utopia, and "life" - were also subjected to incisive critical and methodological reflection and revaluation. The chapters in this collection argue that Romanticism’s marked ambivalence and resistance to decisive conceptualization arises precisely from the fact that Romantic authors simultaneously extended the project of European modernity while offering Romantic concepts as means for a sustained critical reflection on that very process. Focusing especially on the topics of form (both literary and organic), secularization (and its political correlates, utopia and apocalypse), and the question of how one narrates the arrival of modernity, this collection collectively emphasizes the importance of understanding modernity through the lens of Romanticism, rather than simply understanding Romanticism as part of modernity. This book was previously published as a special issue of European Romantic Review.

Romantic Imperialism

Romantic Imperialism PDF Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521586047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over a hundred and fifty million people brought under British imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and looks at the ways in which they were identified with and contested in Romanticism. Saree Makdisi argues that this process has to be understood in global terms, beyond the British and European viewpoint, and that developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world (up to and including our own time) enable us to understand more fully the texts and contexts of British Romanticism. New and original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Scott emerge in the course of this searching analysis of the cultural process of globalisation. Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1998.

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion PDF Author: Alexander J. B. Hampton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108429440
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
"The fundamental concern of Romanticism, which brought about its inception, determined its development, and set its end, was the need to create a new language for religion"--

Classic, Romantic, and Modern

Classic, Romantic, and Modern PDF Author: Jacques Barzun
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226038520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Drawing from the works of influential figures in art and literature, the author traces the development of romanticism from classicism and the emergence of the modern ego.

Fantastic Modernity

Fantastic Modernity PDF Author: Orrin N. C. Wang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801865251
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Focusing on the convergence of Romantic studies and literary theory over the past twenty-five years, Orrin N. C. Wang pairs a series of contemporary critics with "originary" Romantic writers in order to illuminate the work of both the contemporary theorist and earlier Romantic. Wang examines Paul de Man's deconstructive use of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jerome McGann's Marxist-inflected appropriation of Heinrich Heine, contemporary feminist interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harold Bloom's pragmatic reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through these examinations, along with commentary on Keats, Jameson, Lovejoy, and Spitzer, Fantastic Modernity attempts a series of new readings of both the theory being used by the various critics and the primary Romantic texts under consideration.

Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism

Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism PDF Author: Kevis Goodman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521831680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Goodman traces connections between Georgic verse and developments in other spheres from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Impossible Individuality

Impossible Individuality PDF Author: Gerald N. Izenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Studying major writers and philosophers--Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England, and Chateaubriand in France--Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social, and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries. Izenberg makes two persuasive and related arguments. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses: a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise. Izenberg demonstrates how the Romantics retreated, in part, from a preliminary, radically activist ideal of autonomy they had worked out under the impact of the French Revolution. They had begun by seeing the individual self as the sole source of meaning and authority, but the convergence of crises in their personal lives with the crises of the revolution revealed this ideal as dangerously aggressive and self-aggrandizing. In reaction, the Romantics shifted their absolute claims for the self to the realm of creativity and imagination, and made such claims less dangerous by attributing totality to nature, art, lover, or state, which in return gave that totality back to the self.

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism PDF Author: James Seaton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107026105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
This book offers a history of literary criticism from Plato to the present, arguing that this history can best be seen as a dialogue among three traditions - the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and the humanistic, originated by Aristotle. There are many histories of literary criticism, but this is the first to clarify our understanding of the many seemingly incommensurable approaches employed over the centuries by reference to the three traditions. Making its case by careful analyses of individual critics, the book argues for the relevance of the humanistic tradition in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Romanticism as a Transition to Modernity

Romanticism as a Transition to Modernity PDF Author: Jens Stuhlemer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668560536
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 10

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1.7, University of Warwick, language: English, abstract: This essay aims to show how far the Romantic period in German and English literature can be seen as a transitional phase from the Enlightenment and to the point of Modernity. Given the fact that all consecutive literary periods cannot be divided by mere points in time and certain general features, it is going to be shown that the given eras melt into each other; that earlier periods, in this case first of all Romanticism, but also the Enlightenment, the Classical era, established characteristics which would then be absorbed, redefined or rejected by the succeeding ones, namely Romanticism and Modernity. The main focus will be to differentiate between, as well as to equalise certain features of Romanticism and Modernity, which must include a deeper look at the past they emerged from. To do so, it will also be necessary to include a high amount of literary criticism, all dealing with the relevant periods and to exemplify the evidences provided by referring to primarily “Frankenstein”, “Die Räuber”, “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”, and “Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte”.