1st Edition

Romanticism Comparative Discourses

By Diane Long Hoeveler Copyright 2006
    222 Pages
    by Routledge

    222 Pages
    by Routledge

    Exploring how discourse is figured in the texts of key European Romantic authors such as Wackenroder, Coleridge, Byron, and Hugo, this volume offers nuanced readings of the under-explored syntactic, semantic, and ideological structures of Romantic works. Rather than proposing a new theoretical position on the issue of what constitutes Romantic discourse studies, the editors have commissioned essays that seek to capture aspects of this discursive field, building on previous scholarship to offer fresh ways of seeing how Romantic discourse matrices work. The volume is organized into three sections: Language and Romantic Discourse Systems; Women Writers and Romantic Constructions of Power; and Varieties of Revisionist Discourse in Romanticism. Each section features individual essays providing critical re-readings of nine Romantic texts and four Romantic topoi. Whether writing on Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House or Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, on rescue operas or criminal drama, the contributors, who include Marjean Purinton, Kari Lokke, Rodney Farnsworth, and Jeffrey Cass, expand our understanding of Romantic modes of argumentation.

    Contents: Prologomenon to the study of romanticism's comparative discourses, Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Part 1 Language and Romantic Discourse Systems: Gothic opera as romantic discourse in Britain and France: a cross-cultural dialogue, Diane Long Hoeveler and Sarah Davies Cordova; Pursuing the Plerotic sublime: romantic poetry and the failure of language, Richard A. Nanian; Half-asleep on thresholds: fragile boundaries in Coleridge's 'fears in solitude', Onita Vaz; Romantic drama and the discourse of criminality, Marjean D. Purinton. Part 2 Women Writers and Romantic Constructions of Power: Towards constructing a 'poetics of space' for the sentimental novel: a topo-analysis of Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House, Nancy Metzger; The second soul-less sex? Mary Wollstonecraft and the 'Mahometan', Carolyn A. Weber; Ithuriel's spear and detecting the counterfeit: Edgeworth's Miltonic allusions in Belinda, Jeffrey Cass; Parting songs: Hemans, Landon, and Barret Browning rewrite Friederike Brun, Kari Lokke; The discourse of religious Bildung in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, Larry H. Peer. Part 3 Varieties of Revisionist Discourse in Romanticism: Readerly agency and the discourse of history in The Antiquary, Bonnie J. Gunzenhauser; Reading beyond Body, Cane and Crosier: Talleyrand as romantic discourse, Rodney Farnsworth; Byron and Manfred: epistolary journal into dramatic poem, D.L. Macdonald; The romantic artist on the couch: a Freudian approach to Wackenroder's musician Berlinger, Sonja E. Klocke. Index.

    Biography

    Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's Studies at Marquette University.