scholarly journals Discursive Constructions of the Self in British Romanticism

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Christoph Bode
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Discursive Constructions

Abstract This essay examines how subjective identities are discursively constructed in William Blake and P.B. Shelley, making brief references to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith. It is argued that, although the poets come up with strikingly divergent solutions to the challenge of self-modelling, they face the same fundamental problems of self-grounding, working as they do within the paradox-prone paradigm of a Romantic self that tries to constitute itself out of itself. Comparing these Romantic poets with twentieth-century poetic models of selfhood and identity in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, this essay provides a tentative answer to the question of whether we continue to operate within the Romantic framework of discursive self-construction or whether in fact we have moved beyond this mode of self-construction.

Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The Public ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-383
Author(s):  
David Kerler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Archival Practices

AbstractThe article explores the interrelation of archives, melancholia, and their (de)constructive features in British Romantic poetry. It will argue that the proliferation of archives and archival practices from the late eighteenth century on had a strong influence on the literary‑cultural output of the British Romantics. This shall be scrutinised by drawing on an extended reading of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever” (1995) and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, focusing on two basal, closely related aspects: (1) the subject’s feverish desire to archive, and (2) the archive’s (self‑)destructive tendencies. A close reading of paradigmatic writers and their poems (William Blake, Lord Byron, and John Keats) shall illustrate that the notion of “archive fever” turns out to be especially determinant for Romantic subjectivity, aesthetics, and its sujets.

scholarly journals Transcending Self-Consciousness: Imagination, Unity and Self-Dissolution in the English Romantic and Sufis Epistemology

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 08-18
Author(s):  
Maryam Soltan Beyad ◽  
Mahsa Vafa
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Life Journey

English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this reconciliatory state cannot be achieved through rational investigation but via the power of imagination. In this regard, there is striking resemblance between the mystical and philosophical thought of Sufism and the idealistic thought of the English Romantic poets as they both strive for a sense of unification with the Divine or the Ultimate reality, and they both rely on imagination and intuitive perception to apprehend reality. Applying an analytical-comparative approach with specific reference to Northrop Frye’s anagogic theory (1957) which emphasizes literary commonalities regardless of direct influence or cultural or theological distinctions, this study endeavors to depict that certain Romantic poets’ longing for the reconciliation of subject and object dualism via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, echoes the mystic’s pursuit of transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divinely infinite. Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution (fana) in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, particularly the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana.

Poetry on the Porch

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Sand Dunes ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Garden City ◽  
The Family

In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.

Romantic Prayer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

Creative Shipwrecks: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s Don Juan

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Michelle Baker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
As If

Abstract Contemporary discussions of English Romantic philosophers and their theories often include such names as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Lamb, but rarely do they treat of George Gordon, Lord Byron. While Byron’s reputation was not built upon complex philosophical explications of literary theory, the passion of his life did not preclude that of his mind. He has left us with no overtly philosophical work, and yet, many of the digressions in Don Juan are directed at the poets and philosophers of his time and some others seem to point us to a coherent system of thought about literature and how it works. Specifically, Juan’s voyage at sea contains several passages which parody Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Some of these similarities have been explored, but are frequently treated as if Byron were simply creating a pastiche of contemporary literature. However, Coleridge had used the Rime to elucidate a portion of his understanding of how literature works. It seems possible that Byron is purposely answering Coleridge in the second canto of Don Juan. Thus, we may be able to use Byron’s natural imagery and poetic technique to piece together a philosophical statement from that most unphilosophical of Romantics, Lord Byron.

Slow Time

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sachs
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Slow Time ◽  
Apparent Lack ◽  
Rates Of Change ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Fine Detail

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

scholarly journals The Napoleon mystique and British poets

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (26) ◽  
pp. 359-377
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Mc Danel de García
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
At Home

This reflection on the influence of Napoleon and the consequences of the wars on the major British poets of the Romantic era is meant to illustrate how the reactions of both nobility and commoners are recorded in literature and media. The dual perception of Napoleon as both hero and tyrant and the atrocious suffering of those at home and bloody battles are manifest in the works of the major poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and especially George Gordon, Lord Byron. Even today, Napoleon transcends precise definition and he has inspired some of the greatest poets in British literature

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Dorothy Wordsworth

This ‘Introduction’ establishes the importance of the activity Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ for the literature of the Romantic period. It discusses the etymologies of the words ‘mountaineering’ and ‘mountaineer’, showing how they indicated the creation of a new activity and identity. The chapter outlines the mountaineering pursuits and writings of a number of the period’s authors, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, John Keats, and Ellen Weeton, exploring the emerging link between ascent and literary authority. The introduction situates the overall study in terms of current research in the fields of mountaineering and Romantic-era literature.

The Connected Condition

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yohei Igarashi
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Medium ◽  
Great Attraction

How can Romantic poetry, motivated by the poet’s intense yearning to impart his thoughts and feelings, be so often difficult and the cause of readerly misunderstanding? How did it come to be that a poet can compose a verbal artwork, carefully and lovingly put together, and send it out into the world at the same time that he is adopting a stance against communication? This book addresses these questions by showing that the period’s writers were responding to the beginnings of our networked world of rampant mediated communication. The Connected Condition reveals that major Romantic poets shared a great attraction and skepticism toward the dream of perfectible, efficient connectivity that has driven the modern culture of communication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats all experimented with their artistic medium of poetry to pursue such ideals of speedy, transparent communication at the same time that they tried out contrarian literary strategies: writing excessively ornate verse, prolonging literary reading with tedious writing, being obscure, and questioning the allure of quickly delivered information. This book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living in—and living with—the connected condition, as well as the fortunes of literature in it.

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