Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

The Fantastic Sublime: Tolkien’S ‘On Fairy-Stories’ And The Romantic Sublime, David Sandner

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Discusses Romantic views of the sublime as they relate to Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories.” Distinguishes the Gothic (“the literature of fear”) from fairy-stories and most children’s fantasy (“the literature of joy”).

Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

We are still trying to sort out the complex legacy of romanticism. "We" here includes philosophers Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and a remarkable variety of literary theorists, from Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom through Hazard Adams and Jerome J. McGann. Julie Ellison's important book, Delicate Subjects, focuses on an especially difficult problem we have inherited from the romantics: the problem of defining the ethics of interpretation. According to Ellison, male romantic writers worry that in literary interpretation, we murder to dissect (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Criticism, from …

Masterpieces Of Classicism And Romanticism (Fall 1993) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

"Masterpieces of Classicism and Romanticism is designed to give students a broad introduction to the European literature of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. In addition to gaining a familiarity with a few of the great writers of those periods, students should develop and hone their skills of critical analysis. This semester, we will devote special attention to familial structures and …

Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions Of A Romantic Nature [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

Samuel R. Levin's Metaphoric Worlds is an ambitious book. The author proposes a controversial theory of metaphor motivated by a bold reading of Wordsworth's poetry but his theory sometimes falls short of the poetry it is designed to explicate. His respect for Wordsworth, however, redeems these occasional lapses.

Accepting The Romantics As Philosophers, Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

The Romantics are not widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught. Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its self-indulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to abide by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some of these objections have dogged the Romantics from …

Frost's Poetry: Breaking The Boundaries Of The Hidden And The Silent, Michael G. Cooke

The Kentucky Review

No abstract provided.

Wordsworth And Discovery: A Romantic Approach To Composing, Susan C. Critchfield

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Blake, Hegel And Dialectic [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

According to David Punter, "Blake's dialectic and Hegel's share a number of crucial features" (p. 11), making Hegel's Phenomenology the "closest parallel to [Blake's] work" (p. 17). By emphasizing progression through contraries, both Blake and Hegel transform the dialectical tradition that they presumably inherit from Heraclitus, Giordano Bruno, and Jakob Böhme, all of whom Punter analyzes in his opening chapter. Subsequent chapters trace the similarities that Punter finds among such works as the Phenomenology, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The Four Zoas. Although Punter calls his comparison of Blake and Hegel "important and fruitful" (p. …

Spenser: Reflections And Parallels In The Romantic Poets, Sara Rivers Aderholdt

Theses

This paper calls attention to reasonable effects, noticeable echoes, and remarkable parallels of Edmund Spenser's philosophy and his treatment of myth and symbol as found in the Romantic poets.

6. Schiller And Romanticism, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles C. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XII: The Post-Enlightenment Period

To define romanticism is to attempt something which the romantics themselves insist cannot be done. But we can try to identify and then describe it, first pointing out what it is not. One stable element in romanticism has been its consistent rejection of its opposite, classicism. While no great piece of art has ever existed which did not contain elements of both romanticism and classicism, the partisans of these two different points of view have insisted that different emphases made it great. Where classicism emphasised analysis, objectivity harmony, wholeness, meaning, and discipline, romanticism stressed synthesis,subjectivity,disharmony, individuality,suggestiveness. and spontaneity. [excerpt …