Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832

ISBN-13: 9781138276154 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 240 str.

Miriam L. Wallace

Opis

As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelistic concerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension. Among the issues engaged are the eighteenth-century novel's development of emotional interiority, including theories of melancholia; the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel; tensions between rationality and romantic affect; issues of aesthetics and politics; and constructions of gender, genre, and race. Rather than positing a simple opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress and a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays trace the putatively 'Romantic' in the early 1700s as well as the long legacy of 'Enlightenment' values and ideas well into the nineteenth century. The volume concludes with responses from Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt, who situate the essays and elaborate on the stakes.

Recenzje

'Challenging entrenched assumptions about literary history, the essays gathered here make vividly clear why "eighteenth-centuryists" and "Romanticists" need one another's expertise to do justice to the vibrant period we share. Most dramatically, this volume invites us to participate in a revolutionary reconsideration of the place of the novel in a Revolutionary and Romantic age.' Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University, USA 'Miriam L. Wallace does an excellent job of describing and interpreting the varying, sometimes conflicting premises that drive the specialties of Romanticism and eighteenth-century studies.' European Legacy

Spis treści

Introduction Enlightened Romanticism or Romantic Enlightenment?, Miriam L. Wallace; Chapter 1 Novel Romanticism in 1751: Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Margaret Case Croskery; Chapter 2 The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic, Peter Walmsley; Chapter 3 “Disagreeable Misconstructions”: Epistolary Trouble in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond, Scott C. Campbell; Chapter 4 Reason and Romance: Rethinking Romantic-Era Fiction Through Jane West’s, Daniel Schierenbeck; Chapter 5 The Politics of Masculinity in the 1790s Radical Novel: Hugh Trevor, Caleb Williams and the Romance of Sentimental Friendship, Shawn Lisa Maurer; Chapter 6 The “Double Sense” of Honor: Revising Gendered Social Codes in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, Shelley King; Chapter 7 Reading the Metropole: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Tara Ghoshal Wallace; Chapter 8 The Woman of Genius: In Praise of the Inchoate Future, Julie Shaffer; Chapter 9 Frances Trollope’s America: From Enlightenment Aesthetics to Victorian Class, Christopher Flynn; Chapter 10 Response Essay How We See: The 1790s, Patricia M. Spacks; Chapter 11 Response Essay Cultural Transitions, Literary Judgments and the Romantic-Era British Novel, Stephen C. Behrendt;

O autorze

Miriam L. Wallace is associate professor of British and American literature at New College of Florida, USA.