Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture'

ISBN-13: 9780199282050 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 350 str.

Philip Connell

Opis

The Romantic age in Britain formed one of the most celebrated--and heterogeneous--moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of "political economy" as the pre-eminent nineteenth-century science of society. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defense of spiritual and humanistic "culture" developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the "dismal science."
Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship and intellectual history. It addresses the changing political identifications of familiar literary figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also illuminates the wider political and intellectual life of this period.
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' situates canonical Romantic writers within a nuanced, and highly detailed ideological context, while challenging our inherited understanding of the Romantic tradition itself as the social conscience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

Recenzje

Connell's immensely learned and scholarly work has grave implications for any subsequent study of Romanticism. He is skeptical both of humanist idealizations of the subject and self-consciously radical readings of it; his writers moderate and change their opinions, always in the context of reading and discussion of the period, and Connell seems to have unearthed every possible work and author relating to political economy, popular education, and religious politics; the result is a rich, dense, and convincing study that deconstructs pieties of the scholarly left or right.

O autorze

Philip Connell is a Fellow of Selwyn College and Newton Trust Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Cambridge.