1st Edition

Romanticism and Philosophy Thinking with Literature

    274 Pages
    by Routledge

    274 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspectives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entanglement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized, just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic, yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from 18th- and 19th-century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Clare, also extending beyond poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such as Jane Austen’s novels, De Quincey’s autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, or Emerson’s essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as "literature" and "philosophy."

    Introduction: Thinking with Literature  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco  Part I: Romantic Confrontations  1. Absolut Jena: A Second Look at Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s Representation of the Literary Theory of Frühromantik  Christoph Bode  2. History and Poetry: Fundamental Aspects and Affects of the Relations between Literature and Philosophy in English Romanticism  Eric Dayre  3. "Ghostly Language": Spectral Presences and Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems  Mark Sandy  4. Thinking without Being and Acts of Poetry in Shelley  Arkady Plotnitsky  Part II: The Poetics of Thought  5. Prolegomenon to the Remnants: Shelley’s "Triumph of Life"  Simon Jarvis  6. Wordsworth’s Thinking Places  Pascale Guibert  7. Philosophy, Politics, Sensation: The Case of John Clare  Yves Abrioux  Part III: Romantic Selves  8. Philosophies of Identity and Impersonation from Locke to Charles Mathews  Angela Esterhammer  9. The Happiness of Romantic Philosophy  Joel Faflak  10. Subjectivity and Despair in Blake and Kierkegaard  Laura Quinney  11. Thomas De Quincey and Søren Kierkegaard: The Elective Affinities between Romantic Philosophical Autobiography and Autobiographical Philosophy  Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay  Part IV: Transatlantic Romanticism  12. The Tension between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson  Danielle Follett  13. Emerson’s Philosophy of Creativity  Susan L. Dunston  14. The Perversity of Skepticism: Qualia and Criteria in Emerson and Poe  Paul Grimstad  Coda: Cavell and Wordsworth: Illuminating Romanticism  Edward T. Duffy

    Biography

    Sophie Laniel-Musitelli is Associate Professor at the Université de Lille, France.





    Thomas Constantinesco is Associate Professor at the Université Paris Diderot, France and a Junior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).