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Jerrold Levinson
£40.00
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The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol
Nicholas Halmi
218 pages
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216x138mm
978-0-19-921241-5
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Hardback
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29 November 2007
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- Interdisciplinary approach, refusing to treat the symbol solely as pertaining to a particular present-day discipline
- Greater historical range and national scope than in any previous study of the subject
- Lucid argumentation free of jargon
Despite its widely acknowledged importance in and beyond the thought of the Romantic period, the distinctive concept of the symbol articulated by such writers as Goethe and F. W. J. Schelling in Germany and S. T. Coleridge in England has defied adequate historical explanation. In contrast to previous scholarship, Nicholas Halmi's study provides such an explanation by relating the content of Romantic symbolist theory - often criticized as irrationalist - to the cultural needs of its time. Because its genealogical method eschews a single disciplinary perspective, this study is able to examine the Romantic concept of the symbol in a broader intellectual context than previous
scholarship, a context ranging chronologically from classical antiquity to the present and encompassing literary criticism and theory, aesthetics, semiotics, theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, astronomy, poetry, and the origins of landscape painting. The concept is thus revealed to be a specifically modern response to modern discontents, neither reverting to pre-modern modes of thought nor secularizing Christian theology, but countering Enlightenment dualisms with means bequeathed by the Enlightenment itself. This book seeks, in short, to do for the Romantic symbol what Percy Bysshe Shelley called on poets to do for the world: to lift from it its veil of familiarity.Readership: Specialists and graduate
students in British 18th-century and Romantic literature; specialists and graduate students in German literature of the age of Goethe; historians of ideas (Enlightenment and 19th-century); teachers and graduate students of literary theory
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Nicholas Halmi, University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period, University of Oxford Margaret Candfield Fellow, University College
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"The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol is a really fine book, and one that anyone interested in Romantic literary theory will find absorbing. Halmi draws on an impressively wide range of authorities; he gathers a complex argument into pages of pleasurable lucidity; and he pursues his quarry with grace." - Seamus Perry, The Wordsworth Circle "innovative... a brilliant and original study that is essential reading for scholars of the Romantic period." - Orianne Smith, Year's Work in English Studies "an important contribution to Romantic scholarship." - Carol Tully, The Modern Language Review "This book offers one of the most profound reflections on symbol since Paul de Man:
subtle, original and provocative. It is a brief book, but extremely rich, and often brilliant. This is history of ideas as it ought to be written." - Michael John Kooy, THES "Halmi's book will take its place before long among the indespensable contributions to Romantic studies" - Uttara Natarajan, Notes and Queries
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Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1: Defining the Romantic Symbol
2: Burdens of Enlightenment
3: Uses of Philosophy
4: Uses of Theology
5: Uses of Mythology
Appendix: The So-called 'Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism'
Bibliography
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