Romantic moods
Subtitle: paranoia, trauma, and melancholy, 1790-1840
By: Thomas Pfau.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 572
Subjects: English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Romanticism -- Great Britain; German literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Literature, Comparative -- English and German; Literature, Comparative -- German and English; Psychic trauma in literature; Melancholy in literature; Paranoia in literature; Emotions in literature; Romanticism -- Germany
Description: "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [533]-559) and index.
Table of contents: title: Feeling, self-awareness, and aesthetic formalization after Kant; title: Anxious inspiration : radical knowledge in Godwin and some contemporaries; title: Paranoia historicized: the dialectics of treason and political representation in 1794; title: "Long before the time of which I speak" : traumatic history and lyric awakenings, 1800-; title: Fantasie : the post-modernity of Romantic lyricism and political conservatism; title: The purest English : serialization, Eros, and melancholy in the early Keats; title: Melancholy into ressentiment : aesthetic and social provocation in Heine.