Theresa M. Kelley

Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices

Essays forging a new definition of Romanticism that includes the wide range of womens artistic expression.

Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

How can we not feel that time percolates rather than flows? Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides, blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the yukon River. . . . Sudden explosions, quick crises, periods of stagnant boredom, burdensome or foolish regressions, and long blockages, but also rigorous linkages and suddenly accelerated progress, meet and blend in scientific time as in the intimacy of the soul, in meteorology as in river basins. Would we have understood such obvious facts without the theory of percolation? . . . [T]he word time [temps] goes back to the aleatory mixtures of the temperaments, of intemperate weather, of tempests and temperature. if the time of a planet and the time of a river can have such subtlety, what about historical time? We can say, at the very least, that history is chaotic, that it percolates. Simultaneously unpredictable and deterministic, its course blends all paces.

Romantic Nature Bites Back: Adorno and Romantic Natural History

Taylor and Francis Ltd GERR041004.sgm 10.108 / 509580410001680697 Europe Romantic Review 50-9585 (pri t)/174 -4657 (online) Original Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 5 0 00June 2004 heres M.Kell y Departme t of EnglishUniversity of WisconsinMadisonWI 53706USA tk l y@wisc.edu This paper addresses the possibility of Romantic freedom and contingency as a surprising consequence of the work of natural history in Romantic culture. My understanding of the Romantic concept of contingency takes its cue from Jon Klancher’s assessment of the movement of mind that took William Godwin from the rule of necessity in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice to contingency in a later essay titled ‘Of History and Romance’ (Klancher 28–33). As I read the path of Godwin’s replacement of necessity with contingency, it infuses the latter term with a sense of openness toward a future that would be made available by sudden, unexpected shifts in genres, events, or figurative language that constitute the possibility of freedom in history, and in Romanticism. I argue that natural history, and in particular botany as the most widely practiced and popular branch of natural history during this period, is the form of Romantic nature that bites back at efforts to constrain its internal as well as literary resistance to fixed identities and schemas. For reasons that I hope the path of my argument will make clear, I route this inquiry via Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics because its contest with Hegelian dialectics opens an imaginative space for thinking about Romantic natural history and figurative poetics. I begin with a caution: Adorno’s account of ‘natural history’ hardly offers a felicitous approach to Romantic natural history. For at the end of the section of Negative Dialectics that deals with this topic, Adorno explains succinctly that what he means by ‘natural history’ is a history in which ‘devouring and being devoured’ is the only game in town. This view of natural history as the simultaneous rather than sequential work of natural selection, Adorno suggests, meets its match (and more) in Hegel, where human history is identified with ‘the progressing mastery of nature’ (Dialectics 355). In part on Marx’s behalf, Adorno insists that although the ‘law’ of nature looks inevitable, it is so only because capitalist production would have it so. Whereas social Darwinists take up this

Restless romantic plants: Goethe meets Hegel

This essay investigates the problem that Goethes 1790 Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen presents to Hegels representations of plant nature. Goethes essay argues for a view of plant vitality and inner direction operating in and on mechanisms of plant development. Precisely because Goethes essay revises and critiques the Naturphilosophie account of spirit in nature, he is in one sense Hegels potential ally. But because Goethe also argues that an inner directed, apparently spiritual dimension of plant development is at work in its mechanical processes, he is also Hegels necessary antagonist. As Hegel constructs an intricate, vexed account of plant unrest that rejects contemporary claims for plant life and inner‐directedness in successive versions of his Philosophy of Nature, his consideration of Goethes analysis of plant metamorphosis shifts between critique and admiration. Hegels remarkable claim that the plant sacrifices itself for others (a curious, if brief, moment of plant agency) is directed against Goethe and, more subtly, against Hegels own reluctant notice of the categorical restlessness of plants. This set of differences, half masked by points of agreement, registers key antinomies in the nineteenth‐century debate about individuality, singularity, species, and botanical nature and the unsettled ground of Romantic nature.