Thomas Pfau

Wordsworth's profession : form, class, and the logic of early Romantic cultural production

Introduction 1. Description: picturesque aesthetics and the production of the English Middle Class, 1730-1798 2. Instruction: romantic theories of elemental and cultural literacy and the Lyrical Ballads 3. Vocation: automimesis and the political economy of spirit and body in The Prelude Notes Bibliography Index.

Lessons of Romanticism : a critical companion

Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, Lessons of Romanticism strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology—in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context—ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies. With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and pedagogical purposes of art exhibits in London, the materiality of late Romantic salon culture, the extracanonical status of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, and Romantic imagery in Beethoven’s music and letters, Lessons of Romanticism reveals the practices that were at the heart of European Romantic life. Focusing on the six decades from 1780 to 1832, this collection is arranged thematically around gender and genre, literacy, marginalization, canonmaking, and nationalist ideology. As Americanists join with specialists in German culture, as Austen is explored beside Beethoven, and as discussions on newly recovered women’s writings follow fresh discoveries in long-canonized texts, these interdisciplinary essays not only reflect the broad reach of contemporary scholarship but also point to the long-neglected intertextual and intercultural dynamics in the various and changing faces of Romanticism itself. Contributors. Steven Bruhm, Miranda J. Burgess, Joel Faflak, David S. Ferris, William Galperin, Regina Hewitt, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, H. J. Jackson, Theresa M. Kelley, Greg Kucich, C. S. Matheson, Adela Pinch, Marc Redfield, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Marlon B. Ross, Maynard Solomon, Richard G. Swartz, Nanora Sweet, Joseph Viscomi, Karen A. Weisman, Susan I. Wolfson

Beyond liberal Utopia: freedom as the problem of modernity

This essay critiques the concept of the “punctual” or autonomous self that served as the foundation of classical liberalism and its moral philosophy, beginning in the work of A. Smith, T. Paine, and I. Kant. Grounded in the language of “rights,” personal liberty, and rational self‐possession, the modern individual is paradoxically characterized as a unique agent and as formally equivalent to all other such beings. Furthermore, its political and epistemological claims rest on unexamined assumptions about freedom that would be severely challenged by the pessimistic turn of much nineteenth‐century literary and philosophical narrative.

Bildungsspiele: Vicissitudes of Socialization in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

This essay scrutinizes the narrative logic of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), widely regarded as the most paradigmatic instance of the European Bildungsroman. Of particular concern is whether the formal and psychological self‐organization of Goethe’s narrative and its protagonist can still be articulated as an entelechy, that is, as a manifestation of a teleological framework whose (ontological) authority is absolute and independent of its fulfilment by a specific narrative. Focusing on the ubiquity of “play” (Spiel) throughout the novel, this essay concludes that, appearances notwithstanding, the Aristotelian/Thomist framework is no longer operative in Goethe’s novel. Rather, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – herein differing from Goethe’s botanical writings of the same period – presents us with an emergentist rather than teleological model of narrative rationality, that is, a progression that is neither predictable nor susceptible of repetition.

Conjuring History: Lyric Cliche, Conservative Fantasy, and Traumatic Awakening in German Romanticism

The ambiguity of the . . . revelation of the past does not depend so much on the vacillation of its content between the Imaginary and the Real, for it locates itself in both. Nor is it exactly error or falsehood. The point is that it presents us with the birth of Truth in the Word, and thereby brings us up against the reality of what is neither true nor false. . . . For the Truth of this revelation lies in the present Word which testifies to it in contemporary reality and which grounds it in the name of that reality. Yet in that reality, it is only the Word which bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past which has been thrust aside at each crossroads where the event has made its choice. . . . [Historical anamnesis] is not a question of reality, but of Truth, because the effect of a full Word is to reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the

Shadowing the Lyric: Tilottama Rajan Reads Romantic Narrative

A review of Tilottama Rajan’s Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (2010).

Of Ends and Endings: Teleological and Variational Models of Romantic Narrative

This essay sketches the antithesis between a teleological and a variational model of development (Bildung) in nineteenth‐century thought, with a particular focus on narrative. I argue that, in the course of that century, the initially dynamic logic of Bildung is gradually vanquished by an institutional model that shifts away from Goethes contingent, open‐ended logic of development and towards a notion of Bildung as the virtual and soon canonical property of information.

Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts

Literary works of the Romantic period have often been viewed primarily as expressions of escapism, disillusionment or apostasy on the writers part. In contrast, this book argues that political repression had an important effect on the production of romantic texts.