Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction
Michael Ferber
Language: English
Pages: 168
ISBN: 019956891X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Ferber explores Romanticism during the period of its incubation, birth, and growth, covering the years roughly from 1760 to 1860. This is the only introduction to Romanticism that incorporates not only the English but the Continental movements, and not only literature but music, art, religion, and philosophy. Balancing lively details with intriguing topics, it sheds light on such subjects as the "Sensibility" movement, which preceded Romanticism; the rising prestige of the poet as inspired prophet; the suffering and neglect of the poet; the rather different figure of the "poetess"; Romanticism as a religious trend; Romantic philosophy and science; and Romantic responses to the French Revolution, the Orient, gypsies, and the condition of women. Ferber offers a definition and several general propositions about this very diverse movement, as well as a discussion of the word "Romantic" and where it came from. Finally, some two hundred authors or artists are cited or quoted, many at length, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Hugo, Goethe, Pushkin, Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, and Delacroix.
crucially in this respect from 'close readings,' familiar since the New Critics, tracing the harmonious interplay of form and content. Instead of furthering the expression of meaning, the interplay of rhetorical and thematic structures checks or thwarts it - suspends it in the 'thematization' of this very interplay. 'Time and History in Wordsworth' differs decisively both from Hartman's account of Wordsworth and from historicist conceptions of Romantic poetry. De Man locates the key to an
(1850), II, 235-7), issues in the gain of a second meaningful relationship, with the visible world, and a second object of love, Nature (and in Freud's story, the woman who will be the object of mature sexual love). The second story, the 'propping' story, describes the displacement of a non-sexual and in some sense non-meaningful relation - an 'instinct', or mere needby a sexual one, a 'drive', of an altogether different order. While the object of the instinct is a physical object (milk), the
critical commonplace that Romanticism is committed to the symbol as the most authentic and expressive kind of figurative language. Coleridge, making a judgement subsequently presumed by most modern literary criticism and shared by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, identified allegory as inferior to symbol, as a product of the fancy rather than the imagination. But in their 'most original and profound moments', de Man writes, the texts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European
University Press, 1964). 4. The opening paragraphs seem to have been left out when de Man gave this lecture again (around 1971 or 1972). The new lecture began with some more informal remarks about what it means to read based on a version of the following notes: reading not declaim it - pure dramatic, vocal presence not analyze it structurally - as in Ruwet semantic, thematic element remains present in Jakobson/Riffaterre but read, which means that the thematic element remains taken into
crowd. Like Wordsworth in Book VII of The Prelude, unable to read the faces of the city streets ('The face of everyone / That passes by me is a mystery', VII, 597-8), or violently confronted by the minimal characters of a blind man's label, De Quincey experiences the autobiographical text itself as a lawless, meaningless multiplication of difference - as textuality without a face. Hence his attempt to anchor the wanderings of self-loss by fixing identity on the (ever-to-be) recovered face of Ann: