Romanticism and the Contingent Self

The Challenge of Representation

Michael Falk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031499586
• eBook ISBN: 9783031499593
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Literature

This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the 'centrality' of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Strange Multiplicities
• 2. Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Contingent Selfhood
• 3. Fiction: Growing Down in Edgeworth and Opie’s Novels
• 4. Lyric: Self-Abnegation in the Sonnets of Clare and Smith
• 5. Drama: Inner Seas in the Tragedies of Baillie and Harpur
• 6. Prose: Moore’s Multiform Byron
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter