Romantic Narrative

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century.While engaging both genres, Romantic Narrative responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that poiesis, as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism’s legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley’s Alastor and his Gothic novels, Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman. Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism’s leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, Romantic Narrative will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory

Blake, Hegel, and the Sciences

In the Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel calls nature “the negative of the Idea,” an alien existence where spirit does not find itself. He also describes it as a “frozen” or “petrified intelligence,” attributing the phrase to Schelling (Hegel, Nature 14–15). Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815), posthumously published only in 1861 and so unavailable to Hegel, does indeed begin with a geological unconscious that impedes any progressive narrative of cosmic or human history, as time is locked in a “rotatory movement” that blocks any “true beginning” or “veritable end” (Schelling, Ages 20). However, the text Hegel evokes is not Schelling’s Ages but his earlier System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), and it is Hegel who adds the words “erstarrte [congealed]” and “versteinerte [petrified],” sometimes translated as “fossilized.”1 For in the SystemSchelling had seen no resistance between matter and spirit, nonliving and living being, envisioning a seamless process that resolves “the whole of nature … into an intelligence” (6). Hegel invokes the Schelling of the Identity philosophy because he too wants an Aufhebungof “the dead and unconscious products of nature” that overcomes the resistance of the inorganic to organization, as life self-organizes towards spirit (Schelling, System 6)

Immunitary Foreclosures: Schelling and British Idealism

This paper considers how Schelling’s earlier work functions as a fifth column for the Germano-Coleridgeans, particularly Coleridge himself and Green. I consider their engagement with Schelling’s First Outline in relation to the Hunterian collection bought by the Crown in 1799, which made the life sciences a public concern within the framework of how knowledge was to be organized. The paper explores the pressure the life sciences put on philosophy and the constraining of both, in the context of British Idealism, by religious imperatives that are internal, conceptual censors, and external (cultural and institutional) censors. Consolidating his work between the Romantic and Victorian periods, Green is a neglected figure in a progress from natural to political theology that coincides with a shift in British idealism from Schelling to a sanitized Hegel. Coleridge’s dialogue with and often expedient misrepresentations of Schelling are more complex, as he uses Schelling’s “Stufenfolge” to argue for a design in nature, yet is constantly troubled by a biodiversity and difference in nature to which Schelling was more open. Initially deploying Schelling to reconcile transcendental and natural philosophy, Coleridge can never entirely escape the trouble that biology causes philosophy and that philosophy (through Schelling) causes religion

Models for Systems in Idealist Encyclopedics: The Circle, the Line and The Body.

The Eighteenth Century has been called the “age of the encyclopedia,” but the understanding of that word is very different in the encyclopedias of Chambers and Diderot on the one hand, and on the other hand the German Idealist tradition variously exemplified by Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Schelling’s On University Studies, and Novalis’ Romantic Encyclopedia. In Kant’s terms, the first provides an aggregate of knowledge, whereas the second attempts a system that entails an architectonic. Focusing on Hegel’s desire to unify all the sciences through the meta-discipline of philosophy, this paper explores the increasing complication of his architectonic by the very figures he uses to safeguard it: namely the circle, the line, and the body. Tracing the supplementary relationship between the first and the second, I argue that the body with its multiple subsystems brings to a head the collapse of the “smooth” system Hegel intended into a “tangled’” system: a productive collapse, because instead of being a forced unification of knowledge, the encyclopedia becomes a thought-environment for transferences between disciplines and potentially the emergence of new disciplines. Or, in effect, it becomes a form of “Theory” avant la lettre

The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice

Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history

Introduction

This collection thinks the “rights” of the negative against the more common association of the term “rights” with human rights and rights that can be posited. Such rights, despite their seeming liberalism, produce a normative notion of the person which is in the end biopolitical, and moreover, in assuming that rights can always be posited, they assume the primacy of the public sphere. The essays in this collection all resist the current emphasis on the public sphere that has resulted from the absorption of “Romanticism” into the “Nineteenth Century,” and focus instead on Romanticism as a retreat from publication, publicity and consensus. Whether this retreat is absolute negation or a withdrawal that holds something in reserve is a question left open in the spaces between these six essays on Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Coleridge and Goya

“Something Not Yet Made Good”: The Tropology of the Negative in Godwin’s Mandeville

This paper takes up Godwin’s fourth major novel, Mandeville (1817), and explores its extreme negativity as a recursive space for the stalled revolutionary energies of what Godwin saw as the only period in British history worthy of “genuine and independent man”: the period of the Civil Wars and the “English Revolution,” which had many resonances with his own time. The novel, which begins with the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and ends on the eve of the Restoration, is a catachresis: a historical novel whose protagonist never enters history as he progressively retreats into the closet of his psychic history. At its centre is the misanthropic protagonist’s “eternal war” on his rival and future brother-in-law Clifford, who prvides an alibi for an almost pathological deconstruction of normativity. The story ends shockingly with Mandeville’s accidental defacement by Clifford, an effraction that dis-figures all schemes of restoration. But the novel is by no means the “domestic story” that Godwin’s publisher wanted to make it, as Mandeville’s damaged life is a symptom, “imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault). Approaching the text within the political unconscious of seventeenth-century religious politics, I see the fanaticism that provides the text’s historical backdrop and its later secularization as misanthropy as tropes that must be turned back and in on themselves to discern whether history is absolute negation or the site of a dissensus whose potential comes forth warped and convoluted by a culture that represses its underlying contradictions

The Supplement of Reading

Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history