Romanticism and the Object

L. Peer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780230617384
• eBook ISBN: 9780230101920
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics, " an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Romanticizing the Object
• 2 “Things Forever Speaking” and “Objects of All Thought”
• 3 “Perfectly Compatible Objects”: Mr. Pitt Contemplates Britain and South America
• 4 Children as Subject and Object: Shelley v. Westbrook
• 5 “I’ll Contrive a Sylvan Room”: Certainty and Indeterminacy in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, the Fables, and Other Poems (1807)
• 6 “A Better Guide in Ourselves”: Objects, Romantic-Protestant Ethics, and Fanny Price’s Individualism
• 7 The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curran’s Portrait of Percy Shelley
• 8 Shelley Incinerated
• 9 Keats and the Impersonal Craft of Writing
• 10 “Tun’d to Hymns of Perfect Love”: The Anglican Liturgy as Romanic Object in John Keble’s The Christian Year
• 11 Journeys to the East: Shelley and Novalis
• 12 Weighing It Again
• Bibliography
• Index