Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature

275 Pages·2015·1.081 MB·English

by  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Thomas Constantinesco

Romanticism and Philosophy
This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspec­
tives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entan­
glement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized,
just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic,
yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical
significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic
writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a
form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature
across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from eighteenth­ and
nineteenth­century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors
read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that
have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in
their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Clare, also extending beyond
poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such
as Jane Austen’s novels, De Quincey’s autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales,
and Emerson’s essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds
and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive
array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of
Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as “literature” and
“philosophy.”
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli is Associate Professor at the Université de Lille,
France.
Thomas Constantinesco is Associate Professor at the Université Paris
Diderot, France, and a Junior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France
(IUF).
Routledge Studies in Romanticism
1 Keats’s Boyish Imagination 9 Thomas De Quincey
Richard Marggraf Turley New Theoretical and Critical
Directions
2 Leigh Hunt Edited by Robert Morrison and
Life, Poetics, Politics Daniel S. Roberts
Edited by Nicholas Roe
10 Romanticism and Visuality
3 Leigh Hunt and the London Fragments, History, Spectacle
Literary Scene Sophie Thomas
A Reception History of his
Major Works, 1805–1828 11 Romanticism, History,
Michael Eberle-Sinatra Historicism
Essays on an Orthodoxy
4 Tracing Women’s Romanticism Edited by Damian Walford
Gender, History and Davies
Transcendence
Kari E. Lokke 12 The Meaning of “Life” in
Romantic Poetry and Poetics
5 Metaphysical Hazlitt Edited by Ross Wilson
Bicentenary Essays
Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin 13 German Romanticism and
and Duncan Wu Science
The Procreative Poetics of
6 Romantic Genius and the Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter
Literary Magazine Jocelyn Holland
Biography, Celebrity, Politics
David Higgins 14 Colonialism, Race, and the
French Romantic Imagination
7 Romantic Representations of Pratima Prasad
British India
Edited by Michael J. Franklin 15 Keats and Philosophy
The Life of Sensations
8 Sympathy and the State in the Shahidha K. Bari
Romantic Era
Systems, State Finance, and the 16 Animality in British Romanticism
Shadows of Futurity The Aesthetics of Species
Robert Mitchell Peter Heymans
17 Legacies of Romanticism 20 Romantic Education in
Literature, Culture, Aesthetics Nineteenth-Century American
Edited by Carmen Casaliggi Literature
and Paul March-Russell National and Transatlantic
Contexts
18 The Female Romantics Edited by Monika M. Elbert
Nineteenth­century Women and Lesley Ginsberg
Novelists and Byronism
Caroline Franklin 21 Romanticism and Philosophy
Thinking with Literature
19 Bodily Pain in Romantic Edited by Sophie Laniel-
Literature Musitelli and Thomas
Jeremy Davies Constantinesco
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Romanticism and Philosophy
Thinking with Literature
Edited by Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
and Thomas Constantinesco
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Romanticism and philosophy : thinking with literature / edited by Sophie Laniel­Musitelli
and Thomas Constantinesco.
pages cm. — (Routledge studies in romanticism ; #21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romanticism. 2. Literature—Philosophy. I. Laniel­Musitelli, Sophie, editor. II.
Constantinesco, Thomas, editor.
PN603.R568 2015
809'.9145—dc23 2015000730
ISBN: 978­1­138­80550­7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978­1­315­75237­2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Thinking with Literature 1
SOPHIE LANIEL­MUSITELLI AND THOMAS CONSTANTINESCO
PART I
Romantic Confrontations
1 Absolut Jena: A Second Look at Lacoue­Labarthe’s and
Nancy’s Representation of the Literary Theory of
Frühromantik 19
CHRISTOPH BODE
2 History and Poetry: Fundamental Aspects and Effects
of the Relations between Literature and Philosophy in
English Romanticism 40
ERIC DAYRE
3 “Ghostly Language”: Spectral Presences and Subjectivity
in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems 60
MARk SANDY
4 Thinking without Being and Acts of Poetry in Shelley 74
ARkADY PLOTNITSkY
PART II
The Poetics of Thought
5 Prolegomenon to the Remnants: Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” 97
SIMON JARvIS
6 Wordsworth’s Thinking Places 117
PASCALE GUIBERT
viii Contents
7 Philosophy, Politics, Sensation: The Case of John Clare 131
YvES ABRIOUX
PART III
Romantic Selves
8 Philosophies of Identity and Impersonation from Locke to
Charles Mathews 147
ANGELA ESTERHAMMER
9 The Happiness of Romantic Philosophy 166
JOEL FAFLAk
10 Subjectivity and Despair in Blake and kierkegaard 179
LAURA QUINNEY
11 Thomas De Quincey and Søren kierkegaard:
The Elective Affinities between Romantic Philosophical
Autobiography and Autobiographical Philosophy 194
FRANçOISE D UPEYRON­LAFAY
PART IV
Transatlantic Romanticism
12 The Tension between Immanence and Dualism in
Coleridge and Emerson 209
DANIELLE FOLLETT
13 Emerson’s Philosophy of Creativity 222
SUSAN L. DUNSTON
14 The Perversity of Skepticism: Qualia and Criteria
in Emerson and Poe 233
PAUL GRIMSTAD
Coda: Cavell and Wordsworth: Illuminating Romanticism 245
EDWARD T. DUFFY
List of Contributors 255
Index 259
Acknowledgments
This book originates in an international conference on “Romanticism
and Philosophy” held in Lille in September 2012 and organized jointly
by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA) and
the Universities of Paris Diderot and Lille. Our warm thanks go to the
SERA, who set this project in motion and to the scientific committee of the
Romanticism and Philosophy conference: Mathieu Duplay, Thomas Dutoit,
Jean­Marie Fournier, and Marc Porée for their guidance. We are grateful to
our institutions, the University of Lille and the University of Paris Diderot,
and in particular to our research centers Cécille and LARCA, who supported
this project from the start. We are particularly thankful to Camille Masse
and to Jean­François Delcroix (University of Lille) for their invaluable help
throughout the project and to Elizabeth Levine, Andrew Weckenmann, and
Joshua Wells at Routledge for welcoming this project and granting us their
trust and support.
We are also grateful to Cheryl Lester and Philip Barnard for kindly
granting us permission to quote from their translation of L’absolu littéraire,
The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism
(1988). We would also like to thank Jens Martin Gurr and Berit Michel
for permission to reprint parts of Angela Esterhammer’s chapter, a shorter
version of which first appeared as “Impersonation in Late­Romantic
Urban Performance and Print Culture” in Romantic Cityscapes (2013); the
Pennsylvania State University Press for permission to reprint selections of
Susan Dunston’s “In the ‘Light out of the East’: Emerson on Self, S ubjectivity,
and Creativity” (Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.1 [2012]: 25–45);
and Bloomsbury Publishing for permission to reprint portions of Edward T.
Duffy’s Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism (2013).
Finally, we would like to express our sincerest thanks and gratitude
to our contributors for committing their considerable talent, energy and
enthusiasm to this project.