Title: Romantic moods : paranoia, trauma, and melancholy, 1790-1840 /
Authors: Pfau, Thomas, 1960-
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press,
Year: 2005
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; Romanticism Great Britain; German literature History and criticism; Comparative literature English and German; Comparative literature German and English.; Psychic trauma in literature.; Melancholy in literature.; Paranoia in literature.; Emotions in literature.; Romanticism Germany; Comparative literature English and German.; Comparative literature German and English.
Abstract: "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 trajectory of Romantic thought paranoia characterizes the disintegration of traditional models of causation and representation during the French Revolution; trauma, the radical political, cultural, and economic restructuring of Central Europe in the Napoleonic era; and melancholy, the dominant post-traumatic condition of stalled, post-Napoleonic history both in England and on the continent."--Jacket.
Contents: Feeling, self-awareness, and aesthetic formalization after Kant -- Anxious inspiration : radical knowledge in Godwin and some contemporaries -- Paranoia historicized : the dialectics of treason and political representation in 1790s London -- "Long before the time of which I speak" : traumatic history and lyric awakenings, 1800-1815 -- Phantasie : the postmodernity of Romantic lyricism and political conservatism -- "The purest English" : serialization, Eros, and melancholy in the early Keats -- Melancholy into ressentiment : aesthetic and social provocation in Heine's Buch der Lieder (1827).