Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose

ISBN-13: 9780521810982 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 292 str.

Tim Milnes; James Chandler; Marilyn Butler

Opis

This ambitious study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of "indifferentism." Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. The tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Recenzje

'Milnes produces a very informed and erudite consideration … a very deep and at times taxing though rewarding study … the reader is rewarded by graceful turns of phrase that convey rich insight and understanding of the very constructs of knowledge.' European Romantic Review

Spis treści

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Romanticism's knowing ways; 1. From artistic to epistemic creation: the eighteenth century; 2. The charm of logic: Wordsworth's prose; 3. The dry romance: Hazlitt's immanent idealism; 4. Coleridge and the new foundationalism; 5. The end of knowledge: Coleridge and theosophy; Conclusion: life without knowledge; Notes; Bibliography; Index.