DOCSLIB.ORG

The Social Contract and the Romantic Canon: the Individual and Society

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Social Contract and the Romantic Canon: the Individual and Society The Social Contract and the Romantic Canon: The Individual and Society in the Works of Wordsworth, Godwin and Mary Shelley Zoe Rivlin-Beenstock August 2010 Department of English McGill University, Montreal A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree doctor of philosophy ©Zoe Rivlin-Beenstock, 2010 Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract ii Résumé iv Introduction Man as an Island: The Social Contract and Romantic Criticism 1 The Critical Tradition 5 Empiricism, German Idealism and the Case of Coleridge 13 Chapter 1 Individualism as Sociability: The Social Contract, Its Critics and Its Rhetoric, 1651-1792 27 From Natural Freedom to Social Coercion: Rousseau and Society 31 Enforcing Cohesion: The Social Contradiction 42 Literature and the Individual Voice 49 Sovereign Individuality: Hobbes's Leviathan and On the Citizen 54 Self-Governing Individuals 64 Habit and Sociability: Hume and Mandeville 69 Society beyond Sovereignty: Smith and Ferguson 76 Chapter 2 Man, Nature, and Society: The Prelude as Wordsworth's Social Contract Politics and Individualism 84 Individual Form 92 The Prelude and Rousseauvian Pastoral 102 General Wills, Individual Ills 109 Cultivating the Communal Garden 117 The Dead Weight of Communitarianism 124 Chapter 3, "All Play Their own Tune": Individuality and Sociability in Political Justice and Fleetwood 130 The Personal is Political: Political Justice and Rousseauvian Conflict 143 Poetical Justice 153 Allegories of Sociability: Fleetwood and Rousseau 157 No Room of Her Own: Misogyny as a Test Case for Misanthropy 173 Chapter 4, Gender and the Social Contract: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Wollstonecraft and Rousseau 181 I. Wollstonecraft on Rousseau, Enlightenment Progress 185 II. Wollstonecraft on Rousseau, Gender 188 Shelley on the Wrongs of Rousseau 194 Shelley on Wollstonecraft: Maternal Absence and Literary Presence 197 I. Excluded Creatures and Political Metaphor, the Male Creature 205 II. Excluded Creatures and Political Metaphor, the Female Creature 208 III. Excluded Creatures and Political Metaphor, Social Contract Allegory 212 Languages of Paradox 215 Conclusion The Social Contract and Beyond 221 Works Cited Acknowledgements Over the years of work on this dissertation, I was the fortunate recipient of the Fonds québéquois de la recherche sur la société et la culture doctoral fellowship, the Sabbath Fund for Canadian Studies Research Grant, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and McGill University Graduate Fellowships. I am thankful to these organizations for making this work possible. First, I wish to express my immense gratitude to my supervisor Monique Morgan for her unwavering belief in this project, for nurturing it from its beginnings in an independent study on German idealism and empiricism, and over its dynamic changes of form and fortune. Thank you for the rigorous comments and for the generous support. I also wish to thank Maggie Kilgour for her helpful feedback on this project in its early stage as a compulsory research project, and Tom Mole for his advice and support in approaching the job market. Arash Abizedeh helped with bibliographical references for the discussion of Rousseau. I am grateful to Cynthia Chase for her illuminating review of the Wordsworth chapter, and to Catherine Gallagher for a stimulating lecture and ensuing dialogue on the topic of counterfactuality, which contributed to the chapter on Godwin. I wish to thank Amy Garnai and Maya Barzilai for their thoughtful feedback and fruitful discussion of my research. Cécile Binder helped translate the abstract. I benefited from numerous further dialogues in the lively academic environments of McGill, and in Montreal and Tel Aviv. As always, I am grateful to my parents Ruchi and Michael Beenstock for their devotion and table talk. Rosie Canaan and Batya Shoshani reminded me not to give up. My thanks to Lucy Boothroyd for her enduring support and help submitting this i i dissertation. A special thanks is due to Ofer Rivlin for his partnership, support and passion for perfectionism over these years of work and beyond. My love and gratitude to Max Rivlin (2004) and Sasha Rivlin (2007) for challenging me to develop beyond what I could have imagined. ii ii Abstract Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social contract philosophy altered the relationship between the individual and society. In this period, society shifted from the previous model of the body politic, to a new concept whereby a diverse group of individuals unite to protect their private rights by forming a social contract. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all struggle to develop a model of society which places the individual first. Empiricist critics of this tradition such as Hume and Smith were also influenced by the social contract's revolutionary individualism, but more skeptical of its model of community. The social contract perspective and its problems directly influenced the French Revolution, and – by extension – British Romantic literature. But the social contract has received little attention in a critical tradition dominated by an interest in German idealism, and by a firm belief in Romanticism's avoidance of socio-historical context. This study of the social contract tradition's influence on canonical Romantic-era texts seeks to refocus Romanticism's political self-awareness. My dissertation adds to a recent interest in empiricist contexts, expanding existent discussion to focus on the social contract in several exemplary Romantic-era works. William Wordsworth's Prelude is arguably the archetypal Romantic poem, and also the target of recent new historicist criticism. I trace its dynamic dialogue with Rousseau over its long editorial history. Wordsworth encounters similar difficulties to Rousseau's alienated modern subjects, who experience society as hostile to individual desires. I then examine William Godwin's ambivalent dialogue with social contract philosophy, comparing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to Fleetwood , which is critical of individualistic social theories. In Frankenstein , Mary Shelley critiques the iii iii social contract myth of originary independence, drawing directly on Rousseau and also on Mary Wollstonecraft's references to him. These Romantic texts, written a generation after The Social Contract and in the wake of the French Revolution, engage in a new concern with forming a society of isolated individuals. Two hundred years later, this problem remains at the foreground of political theory, partially explaining the contemporary fascination with Romantic icons, such as Wordsworthian nature, the Romantic-Godwinian solitary and Frankenstein's creature. iv iv Résumé La philosophie du contrat social des XVII e et XVIII e siècles a modifié la relation entre l’individu et la société. Pendant cette période, la société est passée du précédent modèle du corps politique à un nouveau concept au moyen duquel un groupe d’individus différents s’unissent pour protéger leurs droits en établissant un contrat social. Hobbes, Locke et Rousseau ont lutté pour développer un modèle de société qui met l’individu à la première place. Des critiques empiristes de cette tradition comme Hume et Smith furent aussi influencés par l’individualisme révolutionnaire du contrat social, tout en étant plus sceptiques quant à son modèle de communauté. La perspective du contrat social a eu une influence directe sur la Révolution française, et – par extension – sur la littérature romantique anglaise. Mais le contrat social n’a pas retenu l’attention d’une tradition critique dominée par son intérêt pour l’idéalisme germanique, et par une ferme croyance dans le fait que le romantisme annulait tout contexte socio-historique. Cette étude de l’influence de la tradition du contrat social sur des textes canoniques du romantisme vise à recentrer la conscience politique du romantisme. Mon travail de recherche s’ajoute à un récent intérêt pour les contextes empiriques, il élargit les débats tout en les concentrant sur le contrat social dans plusieurs ouvrages exemplaires du romantisme. Le Prélude, de William Wordsworth, sans doute l’archétype du poème romantique, est aussi la cible de la récente nouvelle critique historiciste. Je retrace son dialogue dynamique avec les théories de Rousseau sur sa longue histoire éditoriale. Wordsworth rencontre des difficultés similaires à celle des sujets modernes aliénés de v v Rousseau, qui ressentent la société comme hostile aux désirs individuels. J’examine ensuite le dialogue ambivalent de William Godwin avec la philosophie du contrat social, comparant Enquiry Concerning Political Justice à Fleetwood , qui met en question les théories sociales individualistes. Dans Frankenstein , Mary Shelley critique le mythe de l’indépendance originelle dans le contrat social, s’inspirant directement de Rousseau ainsi que des références qu’y fait Mary Wollstonecraft. Ces textes romantiques, écrits une génération après Du contrat social et à la suite de la Révolution française, s’intéressent à la formation d’une société composée d’individus isolés. Deux cents ans plus tard, ce problème reste au premier plan de la théorie politique, expliquant en partie la fascination contemporaine pour les icônes romantiques, comme la nature de Wordsworth, le solitaire du romantique Godwin et la créature de Frankenstein. vi vi Introduction Man as an Island: The Social Contract and Romantic Criticism "I … was reduced to a meer state of nature[.]" (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 94) In Émile , Rousseau prescribes a strict literary
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Birmingham 2020 – Think Big, Think BACO
    FEATURE Birmingham 2020 – think big, think BACO BY LUCY DALTON When Richard Irving and Ann-Louise McDermott made their successful bid to host BACO 2020 in Birmingham, they knew it had far more going for it than the International Conference Centre! Lucy Dalton tells us a little more about the attractions of England’s second city and interviews the two local organisers. ver thought of England’s growth? Back in the Domesday Book era (geographical) waist as a skinny of 1086, the Manor of Birmingham was no-man’s-land? Well think again: sparsely populated and poor. Valued at 20 EEngland’s midriff is big. Not the ugly, shillings, it would hardly have featured on liposuction-inspiring, blobby fat; rather, that William the Conqueror’s tax-hunting radar. enviable bulky, athletic big that comes with Scattered habitation and gentle waterways years of determination, guts and training. punctuated rolling hills. Enter Peter de Why? Birmingham. Birmingham, new Lord of the Manor. In the Birmingham, UK, is the heavyweight mid-12th century he began holding markets centre of Mid-England. As the UK’s second at his castle, from whence developed a largest city (1.2 million inhabitants), market town. Little did the farmers of the and sistered with cities such as Chicago, time realise that the ring in the ground used Frankfurt, Milan, Johannesburg and for tethering bulls on market days would Changchun, it contends in a league of turn into one of Birmingham’s most iconic its own. Though Spaghetti Junction, a (shopping) landmarks almost a millennium Lucy Dalton convoluted local road network with a later: The Bullring.
    [Show full text]
  • The Lunar Society
    Ch F-X ang PD e w Click to buy NOW! w m o w c .d k. ocu-trac The Lunar Society The Lunar Circle or Society was an informal club or association of significant scientific men which flourished in and around Birmingham for nearly forty years. Origins: The origins of the Lunar Society lie in a pattern of friendships that emerged in the late 1750s. Erasmus Darwin and Matthew Boulton first met in early 1757, possibly through family connections, as Boulton's mother's family were patients of Darwin; or possibly though shared friendships, as both were admirers of the printer John Baskerville and friends of the astronomer and geologist John Michell, a regular visitor to Darwin's house in Lichfield1. Darwin was a physician and poet who had studied at Cambridge and Edinburgh; Boulton had left school at fourteen and started work in his father's business making metal goods in Birmingham at the age of 21. Despite their different backgrounds they shared a common interest in experiment and invention, and their activities would show Darwin's theoretical understanding and Boulton's practical experience to be complementary2. Soon they were visiting each other regularly and conducting investigations into scientific subjects such as electricity, meteorology and geology3. Erasmus Darwin Matthew Boulton In 1758, first Boulton and then Darwin became friends of the Derby-based clockmaker John Whitehurst. The link began with Whitehurst supplying clock movements to Boulton’s manufacturing operation but then extended into other experiments. Boulton, Darwin and Whitehurst were in turn introduced by Mitchell to Benjamin Franklin on his visit to Birmingham in July 1758 "to improve and increase Acquaintance among Persons of Influence"4, and Franklin returned in 1760 to conduct experiments with Boulton on electricity and sound5.
    [Show full text]
  • The Adventurous History of Sabrina Sidney
    CONSTRUCTING THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMAN: THE ADVENTUROUS HISTORY OF SABRINA SIDNEY By KATHARINE ILES A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of History and Cultures College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham April 2012 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The story of Thomas Day’s attempt to educate a young girl according to the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the aim of marrying her, has often been referred to as a footnote in Enlightenment history. However, the girl chosen by Day, Sabrina Sidney, has never been placed at the centre of any historical enquiry, nor has the experiment been explored in any depth. This study places Sabrina at its centre to investigate its impact on her and to examine the intellectual and societal debates that informed Thomas Day’s decision to educate a wife. This thesis argues that Sabrina Sidney was in a constant state of construction, which changed depending on a myriad of factors and that constructions of her were fluid and flexible.
    [Show full text]
  • ECONOMICS, POLITICS and PHILOSOPHY We Are Exhibiting at These Fairs
    Peter Harrington london ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY We are exhibiting at these fairs: 7–8 October 2017 pasadena Antiquarian Book, Print, Photo & Paper Fair Pasadena Center, Pasadena, CA www.bustamante-shows.com/book/index-book.asp 14–15 October seattle Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair Seattle Center Exhibition Hall www.seattlebookfair.com 3–5 November chelsea Chelsea Old Town Hall Kings Road, London SW3 www.chelseabookfair.com 10–12 November boston Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair Hynes Convention Center bostonbookfair.com 17–19 November hong kong China in Print Hong Kong Maritime Museum www.chinainprint.com Cover illustration from Atelier Populaire. Mai 68: Début d’une lutte prolongée; item 5. VAT no. gb 701 5578 50 Illustration opposite from John Blaxton’s The English usurer; item 15. Peter Harrington Limited. Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, 133–137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, London SW19 7JY. Design: Nigel Bents. Photography: Ruth Segarra. Registered in England and Wales No: 3609982 Peter Harrington london catalogue 137 ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY All items from this catalogue are available to view at Dover Street mayfair chelsea Peter Harrington Peter Harrington 43 Dover Street 100 Fulham Road London w1s 4ff London sw3 6hs uk 020 3763 3220 uk 020 7591 0220 eu 00 44 20 3763 3220 eu 00 44 20 7591 0220 usa 011 44 20 3763 3220 usa 011 44 20 7591 0220 Dover St opening hours: 10am–7pm Monday–Friday; 10am–6pm Saturday www.peterharrington.co.uk 1 1 ANDERSON, James. Observations on the means of exciting a spirit of National Industry; chiefly intended to promote the Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, and Fisheries, of Scotland.
    [Show full text]
  • Encyclopédie
    The Enlightenment 2 of 62 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-art/the-enlightenment/content-section-0?utm_source=openlearnutm_campaign=olutm_medium=ebook Wednesday 22 May 2019 About this free course This free course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Arts and Humanities: http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/find/arts-and-humanities. This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised for your device. You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University - www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-art/the-enlightenment/content-section-0. There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning. The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA Copyright © 2016 The Open University Intellectual property Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence v4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en_GB. Within that The Open University interprets this licence in the following way: www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/frequently-asked-questions-on-openlearn. Copyright and rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons Licence are retained or controlled by The Open University. Please read the full text before using any of the content. We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality educational experiences is cost, which is why we aim to publish as much free content as possible under an open licence.
    [Show full text]
  • Crossroads of Enlightenment 1685-1850: Exploring Education, Science, and Industry Across the Delessert Network
    CROSSROADS OF ENLIGHTENMENT 1685-1850: EXPLORING EDUCATION, SCIENCE, AND INDUSTRY ACROSS THE DELESSERT NETWORK A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By J. Marc MacDonald © Copyright J. Marc MacDonald, March 2015. All rights reserved PERMISSION TO USE I agree, in presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, that this University’s Libraries may make the dissertation freely available for consultation. Furthermore, I agree that permission for copying material from this dissertation in any form, in part or in its entirety, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professors who supervised my dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the History Department or the Dean of the College of Arts, in which I completed this dissertation. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use that may be made of any material in my dissertation. Request for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of History University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive, Room 522 Arts Building Saskatoon, SK S7N 5N5 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate Studies and Research University of Saskatchewan, Room C180 105 Administration Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A2 Canada i ABSTRACT The Enlightenment did not end with the French Revolution but extended into the nineteenth century, effecting a transformation to modernity.
    [Show full text]
  • MIDLANDS ENLIGHTENMENT Philip Carter
    THE INDUSTRIAL ENLIGHTENMENT SHAPERS OF THE WEST MIDLANDS ENLIGHTENMENT Philip Carter What can biography tell us about the West Midlands Enlightenment? The stories of its principal figures, including Boulton, Watt and Wedgwood, are regularly told. Those of the people with whom they worked and socialised, their associates and collaborators, are less familiar, but offer a fascinating insight into the values and aspirations of the age. Courtesy of VisitWorcester Courtesy Worcester was very different from Birmingham as an ecclesiastical centre and county town; nevertheless it was a location for scientific lectures in the West Midlands. Knowledge v Resources Peter Jones is Professor hether the ‘eighteenth-century knowledge economy’ can of French History at the account on its own for the accelerating pace of University of Birmingham. industrialisation in Great Britain as opposed to France, His book, Industrial Enlightenment, has the Low Countries, Silesia or the Rhineland is another recently been published in matter, of course. On the evidence of the West paperback. WMidlands, we need also to allow for the role played by the market. Further Reading Many economic historians would argue that Britain industrialised first, not Peter M. Jones, Industrial because knowledge levels reached a critical threshold, but because energy was Enlightenment: Science, comparatively cheap and skilled labour forbiddingly expensive. To survive in Technology and Culture in the marketplace entrepreneurs had little choice but to innovate with the aid of Birmingham and the West labour-saving machinery, alternative technologies and creative marketing Midlands, 1760-1820 strategies. Manchester University Did Industrial Enlightenment in the West Midlands therefore depend more Press, 2009, 2013).
    [Show full text]
  • British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference 2005
    British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference 2005 Thursday 06 January 2005 11.00 a.m. – 1.00 p.m. (Thursday) Porter's Lodge Registration: collect delegate pack 11.00 a.m. – 12.30 p.m. (Thursday) Maplethorpe British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference Office Executive Committee Meeting 12.45 p.m. – 1.00 p.m. (Thursday) Maplethorpe Hall Welcome: Professor Frank O'Gorman 1.00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m. (Thursday) Committee Room Panel 1 Frontiers of modernity- mapping literary genre and knowledge Junior Common Panel 2 The ferment of ideas in wartime Britain 1793-1815 Room Maplethorpe Panel 3 National identity: definition, redefinition and Conference Office deletion Maplethorpe Panel 4 Reading Richardson Seminar Room Mary Gray Allen Panel 5 The Spy Lecture Room Mary Gray Allen Panel 6 Defoe and his influence Seminar Room Small Senior Panel 7 Struggles for the liberty of conscience Common Room Wordsworth Room Panel 8 Presenting the eighteenth century: the role of art galleries and exhibitions 3.00 p.m. – 3.30 p.m. (Thursday) Maplethorpe Coffee Lobbies 3.30 p.m. – 5.30 p.m. (Thursday) Committee Room Panel 9 Charity and Its representations in the long eighteenth Century Junior Common Panel 10 Scholarly practice: how to teach and publish Room Maplethorpe Panel 11 The command of language Conference Office Maplethorpe Panel 12 Collecting the eighteenth century Seminar Room Mary Gray Allen Panel 13 Pope Lecture Room Mary Gray Allen Panel 14 Science and Imagination Seminar Room Small Senior Panel 15 Trans-national texts Common Room Wordsworth Room Panel 16 Blake 6.00 p.m.
    [Show full text]
  • Shaky Foundations: the Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America
    bs_bs_banner © 2015 Phi Alpha Theta BOOK REVIEWS EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University; Delaware, OH 43015. Telephone: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643. E-MAIL ADDRESS: [email protected] WEB ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/∼brhistor EDITOR Richard Spall Ohio Wesleyan University REGIONAL SUBEDITORS Douglas R. Bisson Betty Dessants (Early Modern Europe) (United States Since 1865) Belmont University Shippensburg University Jose C. Moya Paulette L. Pepin (Latin America) (Medieval Europe) University of California at Los Angeles University of New Haven Susan Mitchell Sommers Sally Hadden (Britain and the Empire) (United States) Saint Vincent College Western Michigan University SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Mark Mandych Calvin Lever Katherine Berger Daniel Sweet EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Alexandra Brady John King-Kaplan Darcy Miller McKenna Brewer Scott Woodward Rachael Nicholas Robert Bartels Lucas Plazek Sarah Richmond Brittany Somes Daniel Coutcher Jacob Makey Kristina Wheeler Megan Buys Jackson Hotaling Andrew Stock Jason Perry Nancy Ransom WORD PROCESSING:LAURIE GEORGE 316 THE H ISTORIAN AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. By Faisal Devji. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. vii, 278. $21.95.) In December 1981, Pakistan’s ruler, Zia ul-Haq, famously stated that “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state.” Faisal Devji tries to fill this quote with substance and explains that the Muslim nationalism driving the creation of Pakistan shared an “imaginative as much as historical link” with Zionism, the ideology promoting a Jewish state (11). There are the more obvious parallels that connect Israel and Pakistan: Both countries were founded in the aftermath of World War II, as a result of a disintegrating British Empire and UN-approved partitions, when minority populations seeking statehood had to create identities, impose languages, and contend with waves of immigration and strange bound- aries.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth
    1 Erasmus Darwin and the Poetics of William Wordsworth: „Excitement without the Application of Gross and Violent Stimulants‟: Gavin Budge Alan Richardson‟s 2001 study, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, recently drew attention to the importance of early neurological science for the study of Romanticism, but the philosophical medicine of Erasmus Darwin remains understudied by literary scholars, despite its importance within this context. This is despite the fact that Darwin‟s interest in the properties of nerves,1 and his appreciation of the active role played by the nervous system in the process of perception,2 show that he is a thinker whom it is not anachronistic to describe as having neuroscientific preoccupations. The popularity of Darwin‟s writings, moreover, made them a familiar reference among Romantic writers and their public. For these reasons, Darwin represents a key figure in the case for the neural account of Romanticism proposed by Richardson. In what follows, I will both endorse and qualify Richardson‟s argument for the importance of Romantic neuroscience by examining the nature of Wordsworth‟s relationship to Darwin‟s medical thought. As Neil Vickers argues in his essay, „Coleridge and the Idea of “Psychological” Criticism‟, also included in this special issue, Richardson‟s emphasis on the neurological dimension of Romanticism represents a „materialist straitjacket‟ when referred to the context of present-day scientific orthodoxy. Crucially, however, late eighteenth-century medicine was fully prepared to accept that mental states could have real, physical effects on the functioning of the body,3 and in this context the therapeutic aims of the Wordsworthian poetic can be seen to reflect an immaterialist philosophical orientation, despite making extensive use of proto-neurological concepts from Darwin‟s Zoonomia.
    [Show full text]
  • Medicine, Mass Culture and the Romantic Artist in William Hazlitt Gavin Budge University of Hertfordshire
    “Art’s Neurosis”: Medicine, Mass Culture and the Romantic Artist in William Hazlitt Gavin Budge University of Hertfordshire Abstract Although criticism has traditionally focussed on the Romantic celebration of artistic genius, there is also an emphasis on artistic abjection in Romantic writing. This essay argues that the Romantic theme of abjection is linked to the claims of early nineteenth-century Brunonian medicine that conditions of nervous over- and understimulation are the cause of diseases such as consumption and hypochondria, a case which is made with particular reference to the writings of William Hazlitt. Brunonian medical theory also informs Romantic period analyses of a newly emergent mass culture, enabling Romantic depictions of artistic abjection to be understood as a denial of the Romantic artist's involvement in a mediatization of experience which potentially distances the audience from the intuition of reality to which Romanticism ultimately appeals. This ambivalence about the position of the Romantic artist is reflected in the Romantic period debate surrounding the aesthetic category of the picturesque, which is shown to draw on Brunonian ideas about nervous stimulation in a way which makes it exemplary of conflicted Romantic attitudes towards the effects of mediatization. 1 Traditionally, Romantic criticism has been so dominated by a rhetoric of Wordsworthian “health”[1] that the equally characteristic Romantic celebration of disease has been regarded as marginal or eccentric. Romanticism, however, has an enduring preoccupation with perversity and obsession, which has been surveyed by Mario Praz, and is alluded to in my title’s quotation from the British poet R. S. Thomas’s “The Musician.” In what has been dubbed “black Romanticism,” art itself is understood as essentially unhealthy, an attitude expressed in Charles Baudelaire’s characterization of the poetic vocation as one in which you must “cultivate your hysteria” (668), and Arthur Symons’s description of fin-de-siècle Romanticism as “a new and beautiful and interesting disease” (136).
    [Show full text]
  • The Politics and Natural Philosophy of Thomas Beddoes
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Saskatchewan's Research Archive Radical Chemist: The Politics and Natural Philosophy of Thomas Beddoes A Thesis Submitted to the College Of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of Saskatchewan By Tim Nyborg © Copyright Tim Nyborg, June 2011. All rights reserved. Permission to Use In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the Master‘s of Arts Degree in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department of History. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or in part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of History University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 i Abstract In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician.
    [Show full text]