Idleness, contemplation and the aesthetic, 1750-1830
By: Richard Adelman
Series: Cambridge studies in romanticism; Cambridge studies in Romanticism
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 203
ISBN-13: 9780521190688
Subjects: British Aesthetics; English literature; Solitude in literature; Idealism in literature; History and criticism; Romanticism; Labor in literature
Description: "Reconstructing the literary and philosophical reaction to Adam Smith's dictum that man is a labouring animal above and before all else, this study explores the many ways in which Romantic writers presented idle contemplation as the central activity in human life. By contrasting the British response to Smith's political economy with that of contemporary German Idealists, Richard Adelman also uses this consideration of the importance of idleness to Romantic aesthetics to chart the development of a distinctly British idealism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Exploring the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and many of their contemporaries, this study pinpoints a debate over human activity and capability taking place between 1750 and 1830, and considers its social and political consequences for the cultural theory of the early nineteenth century"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-200) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: 1. The division of labour; title: 2. Utilitarian education and aesthetic education; title: 3. Cowper, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft; title: 4. Coleridge's pantisocracy, biographia and Church and state; title: Conclusion; title: Epilogue: Wordsworth and Kingsley.