scholarly journals The Capital and the Romantic Sublime: The Case of Thomas De Quincey

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
National Debt ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
New Type ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
Literary Model

This paper aims to explore the idea that the formulation of the modern discipline of economics involved a discourse on the romantic sublime. By using the example of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), it will address the issue of money and knowledge as two formative experiences in De Quincey's life. Unlike his literary model, William Wordsworth, who is eager to build up his ‘egotistical sublime’ (Keats's phrase), De Quincey is intent on registering his traumatic memories and resultant disorders and neuroses. Thus, he builds up a new type of romantic subjectivity where his personal accumulation of debt can be read as an encounter with the sublime, and it runs parallel to Britain's ever-increasing national debt. The sublime in De Quincey's Confessions carries an ideological burden as it affirms the subsistence of a middle-class individual and his right to participate in the discourse of the sublime. However, De Quincey falls from his middle-class position and becomes one of the poor where his access to the sublime experience is utterly denied. De Quincey's London experience is measured against Wordsworth's London experience in The Prelude (1805) and by experiencing the ‘negative sublime’ (Weiskel), he puts Wordsworthian ethics into practice. Thus, De Quincey's Confessions shows the tensions inherent in the romantic discourse of the sublime in a manner which connects romantic modes of subjectivity to the rising capitalist society.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Nature and the Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

scholarly journals PERTUMBUHAN INKLUSIF : FENOMENA PERTUMBUHAN INKLUSIF DI KAWASAN INDONESIA BAGIAN BARAT DAN INDONESIA BAGIAN TIMUR

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Sholihah Amalina Dyah Hapsari ◽  
Manuntun Parulian Hutagaol ◽  
Alla Asmara
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Growth Rate ◽  
Panel Data ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Inclusive Growth ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Indonesia ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Spss Software

The growth of the middle class in Indonesia that occurred during the last ten years allegedly raised by the economic growth that is likely to increase in the same period. An economic theory which states that inclusive growth is growth that is able to bring the middle class makes economists focus on inclusive growth and the middle class itself. But in fact, the middle class in Indonesia is dominated by the lower middle class whose features are similar to the poor. These issues indicate a gap in the economy. In addition, to talk about the gap, there is no doubt that this issue has long been a discussion in Indonesia, especially the gap between western Indonesia and eastern Indonesia. Therefore this study was conducted to analyze whether it is true that inclusive growth has occurred in Indonesia and how the phenomena that occur in the western part of Indonesia and eastern Indonesia. Based on the data from 33 provinces in Indonesia over a period of 5 years, ie from 2008 to 2012, this study of the Measured inclusive growth by adopting the concept formulated by Klasen (2010) on-Poverty Equivalent Growth Rate (PEGR). This study of the processing of data performed using Excel and SPSS software. The results found that economic growth in Indonesia in 20082012 has not been inclusive in reducing poverty, lowering inequality and increase employment. The results also show that inclusive growth is not a consistent phenomenon in Indonesia. The phenomenon of inclusive growth in reducing poverty, lowering inequality, and increasing employment are more prevalent in Western Indonesia (IBB).  Key words : inclusive, growth, middle class, panel data, excel   

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

The Ethics of Neighborliness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
New South ◽  
Culture Of Poverty ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Downward Spiral ◽  
Ethical Vision ◽  
Crucial Part

Beginning with a close analysis of the life and musical oeuvre of “Blind” Willie Johnson, this chapter explores the ethical vision of folk Christianity. It argues that folk Christians confronted the potential downward spiral they faced (a “culture of poverty”) with an ethic of non-retaliatory, self-giving “neighborliness.” This ethic was expressed in indirect ways, in song and proverb, and a crucial part of the ethic was to name tangible destructive forces as personified evil. Middle-class observers either did not see this ethic, or looked with condescension at what they regarded as primitive superstition. Regardless, the folk ethic not only transformed the lives of the poor, but also articulated its own critique of the dominant Mammonism of the New South.

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