Title: Romantic moods
First published: 2005
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.
Subjects: Comparative Literature, Emotions in literature, English and German, English literature, German and English, German literature, History and criticism, Literature, Comparative, Melancholy in literature, Paranoia in literature, Psychic trauma in literature, Romanticism, English literature, history and criticism, 19th century, Romanticism, great britain, German literature, history and criticism, 19th century, Comparative literature, english and german, Psychic trauma, Romanticism, germany
Places: Germany, Great Britain
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR457 .P48 2005