The Ideolody of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism

A first reaction to the title of this book might be to wonder that it has apparently not been used before: ideology, imagination, subject, society, discourse, Romanticism - a compendium of weighty terms elegantly linked. Another might be to sigh at their familiarity and abstraction: are we in for a strenuously theoretical restatement of some well-worn themes? Readers of George Eliot might have a third reaction: is this a book about Romanticism with a chapter about Eliot tacked on at the end? To answer all these questions simply, let me say that this is a valuable book and recommend it to anyone interested in Eliot\u27s thinking about her art. The scope is large: there are chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Eliot and a strong, even grand, overall narrative. Pyle argues for a deep continuity between Romanticism and the social imagination of George Eliot, but this continuity has a conceptual break at its heart, a break he locates in Shelley\u27s \u27The Triumph of Life\u27. Up to this point Romantic poetry celebrates imagination as a means of reconciling subject and society in enduring cultural forms. For Wordsworth, imagination is a poetics of \u27enshrinement\u27; for Coleridge it is a figure of the institutionalization of knowledge. In Shelley\u27s Prometheus Unbound an act of imagination, Prometheus\u27s recantation of his curse on Jupiter, ushers in a Utopian state which is the end and fulfilment of history, but later in \u27The Triumph of Life\u27 Shelley offers us \u27no imagination to lead us from tyranny to freedom\u27 (115), acknowledging the ideological nature of language itself. As De Man and Hillis Miller have shown, the poem is extraordinarily hospitable to what Abrams called \u27the deconstructive angel\u27; building on their analyses, Pyle writes of \u27imagination\u27s eclipse\u27 and the \u27permanent pressure of history inscribed in Shelley\u27s final, materialist poem\u27 (122). There follows an enigmatic chapter on \u27the materialism of poetic resistance\u27 in Keats, and finally a discussion of George Eliot that drives a firm wedge between imagination - with its potentially destructive powers - and sympathy, the key to social consciousness and indeed its artistic medium. Pyle has interesting things to say about Eliot\u27s exploration of the narrative voice

Say Good-Bye, Cy, to the Shores of Representation: Towards an Abstract Romanticism

20 pagesThis essay is concerned with the ways in which the works of Cy Twombly, especially those paintings that refer to and draw their impetus from the poetry of Shelley and Keats, elaborate an impulse towards abstraction already latent in Romanticism itself

Interview with Forest Barnett "Buck" Pyle, 1985

A resident at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio at the time of the interview, Buck Pyle shares his memories of the West-Pyle Company, ranching and the cattle business in Texas during the early 20th century. Includes additional page of biographical material

Do marine birds use environmental cues to optimize egg production? An experimental test based on relaying propensity

According to the environmental cues hypothesis, female birds use information available to them in the early-season environment to fine-tune egg production annually. However, support for the hypothesis derives largely from correlational studies. In each year from 2002 to 2006, which spanned a period of extreme variation in environmental conditions, we removed eggs from early-laying rhinoceros auklets Cerorhinca monocerata, burrow-nesting seabirds that lay a single-egg clutch. We then measured their relaying rates, relaying intervals, and breeding success. We also monitored the timing and success of breeding in control pairs, and control chick diets. If the experimental females base their relaying decision on early-season cues, then we predict that few will relay in years in which early-laying control birds breed unsuccessfully, and in which a preferred prey species, Pacific sandlance Ammodytes hexapterus, is in short supply in nestling diets. Results matched neither prediction. In each year, almost all (88-90%) of the experimental females relaid, despite that the control pairs' breeding success (32-87% fledged chicks), and their chicks' diets (twofold variation in proportion of sandlance), varied markedly. We conclude that female rhinoceros auklets did not modify their relaying decision in response to variation in environmental conditions, although relaying intervals and their own breeding success (0-78%) covaried negatively. Our results may have important implications related to using seabirds as monitors of the marine environment