English Romantic Irony. Anne K. Mellor.

Susan Wolfson

doi:10.1086/twc24040599

Byron and Romantic Concepts of Inspiration

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2019.0418 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 180-189

Author(s):

Rolf Lessenich

Keyword(s):

Romantic Period ◽

Romantic Irony ◽

Social Distinction ◽

Ideal World ◽

The Creation ◽

The Ideal

Though treated marginally in histories of philosophy and criticism, Byron was deeply involved in Romantic-Period controversies. In that post-Enlightenment, science-orientated age, the Platonic-Romantic concept of inspiration as divine afflatus linking the prophet-priest-poet with the ideal world beyond was no longer tenable without an admixture of doubt that turned religion into myth. As a seriously-minded Romantic sceptic in the Pyrrhonian tradition and commuter between the genres of sensibility and satire, Byron often refers to the prophet-poet concept, acting it out in pre-Decadent poses of inspiration, yet undercutting it with his typical Romantic Irony. In contrast to Goethe, who insisted on an inspired poet's sanity, he saw inspiration both as a social distinction and as a pathological norm deviation. The more imaginative and poetical the creation, the more insane is the poet's mind; the more realistic and prosaic, the more compos it is, though an active poet is never quite sane in the sense of Coleridge's ‘depression’, meaning his non-visitation by his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.

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Reconstructing Realism in Post-Postmodern Narrative: Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Complutense Journal of English Studies ◽

10.5209/cjes.70628 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 29 ◽

pp. 115-126

Author(s):

Jesús Bolaño Quintero

Keyword(s):

David Foster Wallace ◽

Turn Of The Millennium ◽

Romantic Irony ◽

Linguistic Relativism ◽

The Creation

By analysing Dave Eggers’s autofictional work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this article attempts to reveal the role of this author in the post-postmodern narrative of the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of David Foster Wallace, Eggers’s solution to overcome the problems created by postmodernism is a kind of writing based on honesty. Through a rebirth of the author, the objective of Eggers’s New Sincerity is the democratization of narrative in order to create a sensibility network aimed at ending the solipsism brought about by postmodern linguistic relativism. However, this new sensibility is reminiscent of pre-postmodern fundamentalism. The use of meta-metafiction based on the use of neo-Romantic irony enables Eggers to create an escape valve that allows for the creation of a metamodern oscillation—as described by Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.

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