- University College, Oxford OX1 4BH, United Kingdom
Nicholas Halmi
University of Oxford, English, Faculty Member
- British Romanticism, German Romanticism, Comparative literature, Literary theory, Literary History, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Architectural history and theory, and 29 moreClassical Reception Studies, History of Art, Italian Literature, Eighteenth-Century literature, 17th- and 18th-century Philosophy, Genre Theory, Intellectual History, Letteratura Comparata, Teoria della letteratura, German literature of the Goethezeit, German Idealism, Visual Studies, Allegory, Enlightenment, Romanticism, John Milton, Epic poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Begriffsgeschichte, Historicism, Metaphorology, Aesthetics, Architectural History, Sublime, Byron, Critical Theory, Winckelmann, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleckedit
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Romanticism, and 23 moreGerman Idealism, German Romanticism, Symbolism, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Allegory, History of semiotics, The Sublime, Monism, Comparative literature, Literary theory, Encyclopedism, Art and Nature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Deutscher Idealismus, Naturphilosophie, German romanticism and idealism, Histories and theories of modernity, Letteratura Comparata, Teoria della letteratura, German literature of the Goethezeit, Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation, Theory of Sublime, and Philosopical and Cultural Conceptions of Ageing
""Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose includes a generous selection of poems and prose writings, works published by Wordsworth himself being presented under the headings and in the texts of their earliest published volumes. Wordsworth's... more
""Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose includes a generous selection of poems and prose writings, works published by Wordsworth himself being presented under the headings and in the texts of their earliest published volumes. Wordsworth's contributions to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads are included in their entirety, as is the 1805 Prelude, newly edited and annotated. For the first time, The Ruined Cottage and corresponding passages of book 1 of The Excursion are printed en face to reveal Wordsworth's revisionary process.
A general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is annotated (with significant textual variants cited in the footnotes), and contextualizing headnotes introduce volumes of poetry and longer poems. Illustrative materials include maps and photographs of manuscript pages and title pages.
"Criticism" collects 28 responses to Wordsworth spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century, and Susan Wolfson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, Thomas Pfau, M. H. Abrams, Simon Jarvis, Karen Swann, Michael O’Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others, in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical and Topographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.""
A general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is annotated (with significant textual variants cited in the footnotes), and contextualizing headnotes introduce volumes of poetry and longer poems. Illustrative materials include maps and photographs of manuscript pages and title pages.
"Criticism" collects 28 responses to Wordsworth spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century, and Susan Wolfson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, Thomas Pfau, M. H. Abrams, Simon Jarvis, Karen Swann, Michael O’Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others, in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical and Topographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.""
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Using Michael Riffaterre’s concept of cliché constitutif as a heuristic tool, I offer a genealogy of cliché as an aesthetic category. The first section traces the semantic extension of the term cliché from printing to rhetoric and... more
Using Michael Riffaterre’s concept of cliché constitutif as a heuristic tool, I offer a genealogy of cliché as an aesthetic category. The first section traces the semantic extension of the term cliché from printing to rhetoric and aesthetics, in which it is always denotatively negative and never a neutral classification. The connection between the original and transferred sense of cliché is mass repro- duction, which I distinguish from mechanical reproduction as theorized by Walter Benjamin. The second section explains that the literary use of cliché depends on a shared horizon of aesthetic expectations between author and reader. The third section then considers whether such a horizon could exist before cliché became a named rhetorical and stylistic category. The fourth section notes that the pas- toral (and classical models more generally) fell into critical disrepute in England as 18th-century aesthetics became increasingly historicist and increasingly affirmed vernacular and bourgeois, as opposed to classical and aristocratic, val- ues as the basis of taste. Overall, I distinguish two stages in the development of the category of cliché: first as excessive adherence to the conventions of classical tradition, second as excessive adherence to the conventions that replace classi- cal tradition. In the final section I relate the emergence of cliché as a category to the formulation of the modern conception of literature in England, France, and Germany, as a kind of writing specifically intended to provoke an aesthetic response. As literature began to be differentiated from other kinds of discourse and to acquire an autonomous status, precisely the markers by which members of that class could be identified risked falling into critical disfavour and being judged “non-literary”.
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Research Interests: Romanticism, Revolutions, French Revolution, Historicism, German Romanticism, and 12 moreBritish Romanticism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, William Wordsworth, Transcendental Philosophy, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, William Hazlitt, and Germaine de Staël
Research Interests: Epistemology, German Romanticism, Symbolism, British Romanticism, William Wordsworth, and 12 moreImmanuel Kant, Cambridge Platonism, Spinoza, Schelling, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Monism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Associationism, David Hartley, History of Philosophy, Joseph Priestley, and Necessitarianism
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Research Interests: Romanticism, Shakespeare, German Romanticism, English Romanticism, History of Literary Criticism, and 10 moreLord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Neo-Classicism, William Hazlitt, Dramatic Theory and Criticism, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Germaine de Staël, Madame De Staël, and Anglo-German cultural exchange
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Research Interests: Romanticism, Historiography, French Revolution, Historicism, Enlightenment, and 10 moreGerman Romanticism, British Romanticism, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, European Romanticism, French Romanticism, History and theory of literary genres, German romanticism and idealism, Continental Philosophy and Aesthetics, and German Romantic Painters
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Research Interests: Art History, Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century literature, Architectural History, Ekphrasis, and 10 moreClassical Reception Studies, Winckelmann, Lord Byron, John Keats, Philhellenism, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Revivalism and historicism in architecture, particularly medievalism, Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, Romantic Hellenism & philhellenism, and Literary Primitivism
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Research Interests: Romanticism, French Revolution, Historicism, Enlightenment, German Romanticism, and 13 moreBritish Romanticism, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, Temporality, Periodization, French Romanticism, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Histories and theories of modernity, Primitivism, Odo Marquard, Thomas Warton, and Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
Research Interests: Romanticism, Modern Italian History, Italian Literature, British Romanticism, Carboneria, and 11 moreEnglish Romanticism, Luigi Pulci, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Lord Byron, Italian Romanticism, Romantic English poetry, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Filicaia, Lament of Tasso, and Prophecy of Dante
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Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict... more
Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Romanticism, German History, Historicism, German Romanticism, and 22 moreArchitectural History, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Architectural Theory, German Literature and Culture, Classical Reception Studies, Winckelmann, History of architecture, Gothic architecture, Bavarian History, Neoclassicism, Classicism in Architecture, French Enlightenment, Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, Prussian History, Nazarenes, Historicism in Architecture, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Ludwig I. of Bavaria, Eighteenth Century French Art and Architecture, French Eighteenth Century Architectural Theory, Leo von Klenze, and Heinrich Hübsch
Research Interests: Aesthetics, Romanticism, Historicism, German Romanticism, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, and 18 moreGerman Literature and Culture, Genre Theory, Literary History, Reinhart Koselleck, Classical Reception Studies, European Enlightenment, Winckelmann, Johann Gottfried Herder, German Enlightenment, Historicity, Chronotope, Friedrich Schlegel, Revivalism and historicism in architecture, particularly medievalism, Buffon, Historicism, historicity, philosophy of history, Thomas Warton, Historicism in Architecture, and Geschichtliche Zeitlichkeit
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From the beginning of its academic study around 1870, Romanticism has been defined simultaneously as a historical period (chronologically restricted) and as a stylistic type (chronologically open). This paradox, consisting in the... more
From the beginning of its academic study around 1870, Romanticism has been defined simultaneously as a historical period (chronologically restricted) and as a stylistic type (chronologically open). This paradox, consisting in the difficulty of reconciling historical temporality with the systematization of knowledge, can be traced back to the “temporalization” of history in the second half of the eighteenth century, when transhistorical aesthetic classification was destabilized and literary history developed as a distinct critical practice. But the troubled historical consciousness manifested in aesthetic theory of the time—in part as nostalgia for an irrecoverable past—also expressed itself artistically in forms at once engaged with and detached from history, notably stylistic simulacra of the past and, in poetry, failed or ironized revivals of the classical gods.
Research Interests: Aesthetics, Romanticism, Literary Theory, Theory of the Novel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and 18 moreGenre Theory, Literary History, Reinhart Koselleck, Winckelmann, Friedrich Schiller, Art and Nature, German romanticism and idealism, Rainer Maria Rilke, Revivalism and historicism in architecture, particularly medievalism, Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, Thomas Warton, Romantic Hellenism & philhellenism, German literature of the Goethezeit, Rene Wellek, Geschichtliche Zeitlichkeit, Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation, Theory of Sublime, and Philosopical and Cultural Conceptions of Ageing
"For all their differences, the emergent concepts analysed in this collection may be understood . . . as responses to an epistemological crisis precipitated by the perceived limitations of existing taxonomies of representation. . . . The... more
"For all their differences, the emergent concepts analysed in this collection may be understood . . . as responses to an epistemological crisis precipitated by the perceived limitations of existing taxonomies of representation. . . . The paradox, and perhaps the tragedy, of the symbolisms of Romanticism is that they needed to be conceptualized discursively if they were to be comprehended intuitively."
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Romanticism, and 9 moreSymbolism, Art and Nature, Begriffsgeschichte, German romanticism and idealism, History of Philosophy, German literature of the Goethezeit, Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation, Theory of Sublime, and Philosopical and Cultural Conceptions of Ageing
Like Tilottama Rajan’s Dark Interpreter, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol reflects dissatisfaction with M. H. Abrams’s logocentric intellectual history on the one hand and Paul de Man’s deconstructive rhetorical analysis on the other.... more
Like Tilottama Rajan’s Dark Interpreter, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol reflects dissatisfaction with M. H. Abrams’s logocentric intellectual history on the one hand and Paul de Man’s deconstructive rhetorical analysis on the other. But the nature of its subject determined that Genealogy could not be a work of specifically literary theory. Thus the book’s principal methodological models came from the discipline of conceptual history. While sharing with much of Rajan’s work a basic concern with the systematic organization of knowledge in the Romantic period, Genealogy recounts how the Romantic concept of the symbol reacts to the modern transition from theoria (philosophical contemplation premised on the truth of self-evidence) to theory (the questioning of the truth of self-evidence).
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Research Interests: Intellectual History, Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Art History, Romanticism, and 14 moreVisual Culture, Architectural History, British Romanticism, History of Art, European painting, Winckelmann, Renaissance antiquarianism, Comparative literature, Literary theory, Fine Arts, Ruins, Anna Laetita Barbauld, Letteratura Comparata, Teoria della letteratura, Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, and Art Appreciation
An epic-length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as... more
An epic-length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence.
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Madness may remain silent in fiction, but not in opera. In giving voice to the madness of Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, his adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, librettist Salvadore Cammarano departs not only from... more
Madness may remain silent in fiction, but not in opera. In giving voice to the madness of Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, his adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, librettist Salvadore Cammarano departs not only from the novel’s coy supernaturalism, which permit’s Lucy’s otherwise inexplicable madness to be attributed to unseen forces beyond her control, but also from the concept of reality implied in that supernaturalism. Whereas Lucy’s madness seems to consist in a demonic possession, Lucia’s consists in the creation of a subjective reality that is consistent with itself but not with the events enacted on stage. Thus the concept of reality implied in the opera—a reality divided between what is inside and what is outside the mind—is essentially Lockean.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Romanticism, German Romanticism, and 9 moreSymbolism, Walter Benjamin, Monadology, Art and Nature, German romanticism and idealism, German literature of the Goethezeit, Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation, Theory of Sublime, and Philosopical and Cultural Conceptions of Ageing
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Digital edition of the sole surviving copy of this undergraduate poem by Shelley, acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2015. I was responsible for the annotation.
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Research Interests: Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Romanticism, Enlightenment, German Romanticism, and 11 moreArchitectural History, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Literary History, History of Historiography, Classical Reception Studies, French Enlightenment, Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, Romantic Hellenism & philhellenism, German literature of the Goethezeit, Romantic English poetry, and Geschichtliche Zeitlichkeit
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La ricezione dell'opera di Spinoza tra XIX e XX secolo
Research Interests: Metaphysics, Ontology, Political Philosophy, Romanticism, German Idealism, and 15 moreContemporary French Philosophy, British Idealism, Benedict de Spinoza, 19th Century French Literature, Baruch Spinoza, Jewish Philosophy, History Of Modern Philosophy, English Romanticism, Spinoza, 19th-century German philosophy, Modern Political Philosophy, 20th-century German philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Italian Philosophy, and Spinozism
<p>The ageing Goethe was fascinated with Byron whom he called the greatest poetic talent. Though suspicious of Byron's Philhellenism, Goethe found in Byron an openness to encounter non-English cultures, an attentiveness to... more
<p>The ageing Goethe was fascinated with Byron whom he called the greatest poetic talent. Though suspicious of Byron's Philhellenism, Goethe found in Byron an openness to encounter non-English cultures, an attentiveness to national histories and in interest in the relationship of the individual to social life. Byron's self-contextualising, self-historicising narrative poems constitute a parallel to Goethe's own literary campaigns for cross-cultural engagement in the 1810s and 1820s and, despite Byron's alienation from England, offer hope for the prospects of what Goethe was to call "world literature".</p>
This chapter focuses on Byron’s The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante alongside his translations of Filicaja in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. It begins by exploring the ways in which... more
This chapter focuses on Byron’s The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante alongside his translations of Filicaja in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. It begins by exploring the ways in which Byron ‘exploited both the writings and the figures of Italian writers (especially the exiled Dante and imprisoned Tasso) to construct his own cosmopolitan poetic identity’, reinventing himself as simultaneously – and ambiguously – an English and an Italian poet. In the translation of Pulci, however, Byron stresses his foreignness to both British and Italian poetic traditions, cutting a cosmopolitan figure not through identity but difference. While in his letters – and, of course, many of his poems – Byron is both British and Italian, Italian literature could also offer the poet a way of being neither.
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Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the... more
Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the “four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume produce, as Wordsworth might say, a “timely utterance.”
Walter Benjamin insisted that the Romantic idea of the The Greek word symbolon was originally applied to a to symbol has nothing beyond the name in common with the ken— one half of a broken coin, for instance—which identi genuine one, by... more
Walter Benjamin insisted that the Romantic idea of the The Greek word symbolon was originally applied to a to symbol has nothing beyond the name in common with the ken— one half of a broken coin, for instance—which identi genuine one, by which he meant the theological one. But fied its possessor to the possessor of a matching token and the basis of his objection to the Romantic idea was that it had established the right of the one to receive hospitality or pay been expropriated from its proper context. If no more than ment from the other. But its introduction into the religious the name had been in question here, then Benjamin could sphere to designate the means by which God reveals himself hardly have called the Romantic symbol a "usurper" to the initiates as well as the means by which the initiates ( Usurpator). The aesthetic concept could have displaced the identify themselves to one another did not constitute a radi theological concept, as Benjamin's political metaphor imcal departure from its original meaning. The continuity be plies, only because the two concepts had too much in comtween profane and religious symbola consisted in their equal mon to co-exist peacefully. So it is by a reversal of direction dependence upon the willingness of those who presented along Benjamin's line of argument that such distinguished and beheld them to attribute their significance to a prior Coleridgeans as Thomas McFarland and J. Robert Barth have agreement or act of institution—whether that agreement was sought to demonstrate that the symbol is indeed a fundamena mutually hospitable relationship between two families, a tally theological concept. To claim the concept for theology commercial alliance between two cities, a covenant between is thus to reclaim it from aesthetics, and in that respect the God and mankind, or a metaphysical connection between claim constitutes an assertion of property rights as much as— the transcendent and the immanent. According to the sec and perhaps more than—an act of explanation. What the ond-century Chaldean Oracles, which Coleridge read in symbol gains by being subsumed under the category of the Thomas Stanley's History of the Chaldaick Philosophy, it is only theological is greater legitimacy, since its irrationality can because the transcendent paternal intellect (patrikos nous) now be dignified as a mystery of transcendent origin. But is has implanted symbols of itself in the soul that the soul can there sufficient evidence to conclude that the Coleridgean escape its corporeal imprisonment and return to its divine symbol is derived from or even compatible with Christian source (Oracula chaldaica frgs. 108-9 des Places; cf. Coleridge, theology? Notebooks [1957-], 5: 4424, 4446-47).1
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During the eighteenth century an emergent historicism, which differentiated modernity radically from past ages, questioned the traditional notion of a ‘classical tradition’ of timeless values exemplified in Greek and Roman works.... more
During the eighteenth century an emergent historicism, which differentiated modernity radically from past ages, questioned the traditional notion of a ‘classical tradition’ of timeless values exemplified in Greek and Roman works. Classical antiquity began to be understood as a repository of historical artefacts associated, in part nostalgically, with ‘primitive’ ways of thought. Such recognition of the distance between modernity and antiquity paradoxically encouraged identification with the latter, since antiquarian research permitted increasingly accurate imitation of classical forms in the visual arts from the 1750s, while anthropological reflection on myth stimulated a revival of mythological poetry from the 1810s. Yet British Romantic poetry, whether describing classical artworks or appropriating classical myths, engaged with classical antiquity ambivalently, often ironically. While espousing the Philhellenist cause of Greek independence from Ottoman rule, Byron and Shelley rema...
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Research Interests: German Studies, Architecture, Historicism, Architectural History, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and 15 moreGerman Literature and Culture, German Classicisms, Nineteenth Century Art, Literary studies, Gothic architecture, Architectural Design, Classicism in Architecture, French Enlightenment, French Classicism, Historicism in Architecture, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Ludwig I. of Bavaria, Johann Bernhard Fischer Von Erlach, Leo von Klenze, and Neo Classicism
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Of English writers of the early nineteenth century, none has so sustained and well-documented an engagement with Spinozan metaphysics as Coleridge. Encountering Spinoza's monism both indirectly, through works contributing to the... more
Of English writers of the early nineteenth century, none has so sustained and well-documented an engagement with Spinozan metaphysics as Coleridge. Encountering Spinoza's monism both indirectly, through works contributing to the pantheism controversy of the 1790s, and directly, in intensive study of a collected edition of Spinoza's works in 1812-13, Coleridge repeatedly identified the Dutch philosopher with Christianity, particularly in his personal conduct, while deploring the moral implications of his supposed denial of free will. This ambivalent response to Spinoza is reflective of a fundamental and persistent tension in Coleridge's own thought between his attraction to a metaphysical monism, as the basis for postulating the unity of subject and object, and his desire to affirm Trinitarian Christianity.
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Since the beginning of its academic study around 1870, Romanticism has been defined simultaneously as a historical period (chronologically restricted) and as a stylistic type (chronologically open). This paradox, consisting in the... more
Since the beginning of its academic study around 1870, Romanticism has been defined simultaneously as a historical period (chronologically restricted) and as a stylistic type (chronologically open). This paradox, consisting in the difficulty of reconciling historical temporality with the systematization of knowledge, can be traced back to the “temporalization” of history in the second half of the eighteenth century, when transhistorical aesthetic classification was destabilized and literary history developed as a distinct critical practice. But the troubled historical consciousness manifested in aesthetic theory of the time — nostalgia for an irrecoverable past — also expressed itself artistically in forms at once engaged with and detached from history, notably stylistic simulacra of the past and, in poetry, failed or ironized revivals of the classical gods.
Research Interests: History, Aesthetics, Romanticism, Literary Theory, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and 15 moreLinguistics, Genre Theory, Literary History, Reinhart Koselleck, Friedrich Schiller, Art and Nature, Literary studies, German romanticism and idealism, Rainer Maria Rilke, Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, German literature of the Goethezeit, Rene Wellek, Geschichtliche Zeitlichkeit, Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation, and Philosopical and Cultural Conceptions of Ageing
An epic‐length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as... more
An epic‐length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence.
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Let's suppose that it were possible to specify a moment in the long history of the concept of the microcosmic man at which the concept was transformed radically and irrevocably, thereby ensuring that the reappropriation of the concept... more
Let's suppose that it were possible to specify a moment in the long history of the concept of the microcosmic man at which the concept was transformed radically and irrevocably, thereby ensuring that the reappropriation of the concept in the Romantic period would be at best highly problematic, at worst simply illusory. What happened at that chosen moment could not, in and of it itself, have produced such an historical effect, but would represent synecdochically, one might say microcosmically, a process that reached its conclusion in the state of affairs announced authoritatively in the Encylopédie: "le mot de microcosme, non plus que celui de microcosme, ne sont plus usités" ("Microcosme"). Obviously that process is too vast in scope and long in duration to be examined fully within the narrow aperture and brief exposuretime of the present papen hence the need for a representative of it, an event that participates in and manifests the debilitation of microcosmic thought Since the event that would best serve this purpose almost certainly remained unknown to the three Romantic writers whom I shall discuss here—namely Coleridge, Novalis, and the geologist Henrik Steffens — we need not be distracted by narrowly conceived questions of its "influence." For my purposes its historical role is limited precisely to its representativeness. What was the event? Nothing more than the publication of a short philosophical treatise in Paris in 1510. The treatise was called De sapiente (On the Wise Man), and its author was the French humanist Charles de Bovelles, better known by the Latinized version of his name, Carolus Bovillus.
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T O SPEAK OF a progression from allegory to the sublime, implying the replacement of the former b the latter, might well seem strange. The obvious candidate to replace allegory, after all, would not be the sublime but the symbol, to which... more
T O SPEAK OF a progression from allegory to the sublime, implying the replacement of the former b the latter, might well seem strange. The obvious candidate to replace allegory, after all, would not be the sublime but the symbol, to which allegory came to be explicitly and unfavorably contrasted by the end of the eighteenth century. Not only did many of the objects and texts most commonly used as illustrations of the sublime, such as the Alps on the one hand and the Aeneid on the other, exist long before a modern aesthetics of the sublime had been articulated, but numerous allegories from Swift's Tale of a Tub to Blake's Jerusalem continued to appear in the midst of this articulation. How, then, may the sublime be said to "replace" allegory? In a sense it should be impossible not only to answer but even to ask this question. It assumes the existence of a single conception of the sublime between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas any survey of the aesthetic writings of this period (and, for that matter, of later scholarship concerned with such writings) quickly reveals a multitude of sublimes, generally presented in pairs: natural and rhetorical, Burkean and Lowthian, mathematical and dynamical, theoretical and practical, physical and psychical, positive and negative. To the twentieth-century reader the cumulative effect of these distinctions and the arguments behind them is likely to be dispersive: by endlessly defining the sublime the aestheticians manage to deprive it of any meaning. But it was not by claiming to describe isolated, individual experiences that the aestheticians created a need-or at least an excuse-