Thomas Pfau reinterprets the evolution of British and German Romanticism as a progress through three successive dominant moods, each manifested in the "voice" of an historical moment. Drawing on a multifaceted philosophical tradition ranging from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger--incorporating as well the psychosocial analyses of Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno--Pfau develops a new understanding of the Romantic writer's voice as the formal encryption of a complex cultural condition.
Pfau focuses on three specific paradigms of emotive experience: paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Along the...
Thomas Pfau reinterprets the evolution of British and German Romanticism as a progress through three successive dominant moods, each manifested in ...
Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology--in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context--ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies. With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and...
Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness ...
Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology--in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context--ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies. With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and...
Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness ...
Holderlin's essays and letters constitute essential documents for an understanding of the transitional period from neo-classical poetics to what can only be characterized as a unique and, in its frequently experimental structure, essentially modernist poetics. This book contains virtually all of Holderlin's theoretical writings translated for the first time. In spite of the great significance of Holderlin's ideas for contemporary critical thought, most of his highly important theoretical oeuvre has been unavailable to English readers until now. Here also are a number of letters which...
Holderlin's essays and letters constitute essential documents for an understanding of the transitional period from neo-classical poetics to what can o...
This book explores Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer in relation to the cultural and economic ascendancy of the English middle class between 1740 and 1820. Its wide-ranging interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms simultaneously afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socio-economic status. Wordsworth's Profession analyzes and correlates changing paradigms of authorship, poetic genre, and tone with the demographic and spiritual...
This book explores Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer in relation to the cultural and economic ascendancy of the English middle class betwee...
Though traditionally defined as a relatively brief time period - typically the half century of 1780-1830 - the "Romantic era" constitutes a crucial, indeed unique, transitional phase in what has come to be called "modernity," for it was during these fifty years that myriad disciplinary, aesthetic, economic, and political changes long in the making accelerated dramatically. Due in part to the increased velocity of change, though, most of modernity's essential master-tropes - such as secularization, instrumental reason, individual rights, economic self-interest, emancipation, system,...
Though traditionally defined as a relatively brief time period - typically the half century of 1780-1830 - the "Romantic era" constitutes a crucial, i...
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency--will, person, judgment, action--from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville,...
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful ...
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency--will, person, judgment, action--from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville,...
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful ...