The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry

Both the literary program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and his personal letters dating from the year of the work's composition are suffused with the rhetoric of illness, detailing a maladie morale characterized by melancholy, nervous "exultation," black presentiments, and a malignant idee fixe.. Often mistakenly identified as a term new to the 1830s, the idee fixe has a considerably longer history, dating from the first decade of the nineteenth century when it appeared in the writings of French psychiatrists Etienne Esquirol and Jean-Etienne Georget. Both Esquirol's early writings on insanity and his seminal 1838 treatise identify mental "fixation" as the primary symptom of monomania, the most contentious and well-known mental disease of the period, and one with far-reaching implications not only for medicine but for Romantic literature, philosophy, and autobiography. Examination of the disease's early reception reveals that, well before Berlioz, the psychiatric terminology surrounding monomania had been absorbed into popular discourse. Malignant and humorous idee fixes appeared in cartoons, diaries, and newspaper articles from the 1810s onward, and in fictional works by Hoffmann, Duras, Scribe, Balzac, and others. Here, and in essays published in musical and literary journals of the period, monomania emerged as an increasingly aestheticized malady, and the idee fixe itself as a signal, not of mental debilitation, but of creative absorption and artistic inspiration. When Berlioz figured himself as a monomaniac, both in his personal writing and his symphonic program, he was responding to a discourse of "creative aberration" permeating Romantic literary and medical culture, and to a fashionable fascination with mental pathology. Berlioz was by no means the only artist of the period to diagnose himself with the symptoms of mental fixation. Musset, Janin, and Georges Sand also described themselves in monomaniacal terms in autobiographical "confessions" permeated with references to hallucination, fixation, and emotional pathology. Indeed, we can draw clear parallels between the veiled self-referentiality of the Fantastique and the autobiographical strategies of the Romantic Confession. Berlioz's "self-sounding" resonates with a host of other confessional autobiographies of the period and reflects the collapse between inspiration and insanity, between anatomy and aesthetics, underpinning early-nineteenth-century theories of genius.

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The Evidence of Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature

Studies in Romanticism ◽

10.2307/25600215 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 672

Author(s):

Richard E. Matlak ◽

Donald H. Reiman ◽

Michael C. Jaye ◽

Betty T. Bennett

Keyword(s):

Romantic Literature

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Against Declarativity

Prometeica - Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias ◽

10.34024/prometeica.2021.22.11544 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 103-117

Author(s):

Hans Kellner

Keyword(s):

Literary Form ◽

Literary Realism ◽

Declarative Sentence ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Realist Novel ◽

Historical Discourse ◽

The World ◽

The Difference ◽

The Moment ◽

Declarative Statement

Historical discourse is a period phenomenon shaped by the rhetorical and genre understanding of the moment in which it became formalized and professionalized - that is, the second half of the nineteenth century. In the figurative arts, realist painting and its rival, photography, was dominant, and the literary form this notion of consciousness took was the realist novel. Literary realism devices replaced romantic literature devices, just as those latter devices had succeeded, but never replaced the eighteenth-century devices. Historical discourse and the very notion of proper history followed realism devices, mostly the single-lens photographic perspective, one viewer’s viewpoint. From a discourse perspective, this approach took the form of declarative, statement-making. Also, it is not to say that the declarative sentence which gives this term its name was rejected as the preferred way of making assertions about the world - far from it. Although a few self-conscious stylists (Derrida, for instance) work hard to avoid it, the declarative sentence is almost inevitable. Their readers work even harder. But just as narrativity encompasses a realm that extends far beyond narratives, so that narratives can proliferate in an environment that has, in a crucial sense, rejected grand narratives, so declarative statements will exist without entailing statement-making. The declarative act became the defining mark of professional history and remained its principal mode, just as it remains the predominant mode of literature and any number of other discourses. Indeed, this essay is written in the declarative rhetorical mode. However, literary modernism, philosophy, and a host of scientific developments have left this way of representing the world behind. Moreover, the same technological and intellectual changes that caused the modernist vision have, at the same time, created a different world to be depicted, a different sort of event to be represented historically. Not only the form but also the content have changed. The ethical and practical frustrations of representing such events have led to a theoretical challenge to the declarative form of knowing and to a challenge for the genre distinctions that constitute guild history: the idea of the past produced by academically professionalized individuals. For example, the difference between history and fiction - or rather, their respective relationship to truth and reality - has blurred. In contrast, history has adopted some of the modernist literature devices and the present’s practical demands.

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KOCHANOWSKI MALCZEWSKIEGO – KOCHANOWSKI NORWIDA

Colloquia Litteraria ◽

10.21697/cl.2016.1.6 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 75

Author(s):

Ewangelina Skalińska

Keyword(s):

Romantic Literature ◽

Polish Literature

The article deals with the reception of the Old-Polish and early Romantic literature in Norwid’s body of work. The author argues that when Norwid deals with Old-Polish literature, especially Jan Kochanowski’s texts, he mostly does it by evoking Antoni Malczewski’s poetic novel Maria.

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John Keats and John Clare: The Ivory Tower Poets of British Romanticism

Advances in Language and Literary Studies ◽

10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.2p.67 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 67

Author(s):

Moslem Ahmadi

Keyword(s):

John Keats ◽

Ivory Tower ◽

British Romanticism ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Literary Works ◽

The Real ◽

John Clare

The focus of this research is in the area of the British Romantic literature. Such a study is important in order to demonstrate how the great poets of the British Romantic literature possess the potential to be regrouped under new labels based on the existence of similar attitudes in their literary works. The findings from this research provide evidence that the labels by means of which the scholars group different poets of an age are not fixed and they are susceptible to change. The main conclusion drawn from this study is that new literary labels can be an excellent methodology for determining the real attitudes which influence different poets’ literary works. This paper recommends that new literary labels can be an excellent way for a better understanding of literary works.

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