Romanticism and the Object
About This Book
Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics, " an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on the Contributors
- 1 Introduction: Romanticizing the Object
- 2 âThings Forever Speakingâ and âObjects of All Thoughtâ
- 3 âPerfectly Compatible Objectsâ: Mr. Pitt Contemplates Britain and South America
- 4 Children as Subject and Object: Shelley v. Westbrook
- 5 âIâll Contrive a Sylvan Roomâ: Certainty and Indeterminacy in Charlotte Smithâs Beachy Head, the Fables, and Other Poems (1807)
- 6 âA Better Guide in Ourselvesâ: Objects, Romantic-Protestant Ethics, and Fanny Priceâs Individualism
- 7 The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curranâs Portrait of Percy Shelley
- 8 Shelley Incinerated
- 9 Keats and the Impersonal Craft of Writing
- 10 âTunâd to Hymns of Perfect Loveâ: The Anglican Liturgy as Romanic Object in John Kebleâs The Christian Year
- 11 Journeys to the East: Shelley and Novalis
- 12 Weighing It Again
- Bibliography
- Index