Romanticism and Modernity

Thomas Pfau, Robert Mitchell, Thomas Pfau, Robert Mitchell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415690188
• eBook ISBN: 9781317978640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Romanticism and Modernity: Epistemological Continuities and Discontinuities
• 3. Natural Purposes and the Reflecting Power of Judgment: The Problem of the Organism in Kant’s Critical Philosophy
• 4. Excitability: The (Dis)Organization of Knowledge from Schelling’s First Outline (1799) to Ages of the World (1815)
• 5. After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence
• 6. Modernity and the Fate of Utopian Representation in Wordsworth’s “Female Vagrant”
• 7. How to Move from Romanticism to Post-Romanticism: Schelling, Hegel, and Heine
• 8. Sometimes a Stick is Just a Stick: The Essay as (Organic) Form
• 9. Bildungsspiele: Vicissitudes of Socialization in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
• 10. The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem
• 11. Machines of Turning Actions into Reactions: The German Novella and the Event
• 12. Arendt, Byron, and De Quincey in Dark Times
• 13. Cryptogamia
• 14. Romanticism, Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Silence
• Index