Romanticism Reconsidered

Fülszöveg

Third Printing $5.50
ROMANTICISM RECONSIDERED
Selected Papers from the EnglisK Institute
Edited with a Foreword by Northrop Frye
These papers from the English Institute by four distinguished scholars—M. H. Ahrams. Lionel Trilling, René Wellelc, and Northrop Frye—are concerned with a reconsideration of the term Romanticism.
In an introductory essay Professor Frye discusses the revolutionary element in Romanticism—both in theme and in content—and shows how this feature of Romanticism underwent a change from ecstasy to ironic despair. Many of the points he makes are documented and analyzed in the papers that follow. Professor Abrams, for example, considers English Romanticism in a revolutionary age, of which the French Revolution was the central symbol. As the hopes linked with the Revolution turned to disillusionment and despair with the failure of the Revolution to fulfill its high promises, the theme of revolution was transferred from the social to the mental world. One... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Third Printing $5.50
ROMANTICISM RECONSIDERED
Selected Papers from the EnglisK Institute
Edited with a Foreword by Northrop Frye
These papers from the English Institute by four distinguished scholars—M. H. Ahrams. Lionel Trilling, René Wellelc, and Northrop Frye—are concerned with a reconsideration of the term Romanticism.
In an introductory essay Professor Frye discusses the revolutionary element in Romanticism—both in theme and in content—and shows how this feature of Romanticism underwent a change from ecstasy to ironic despair. Many of the points he makes are documented and analyzed in the papers that follow. Professor Abrams, for example, considers English Romanticism in a revolutionary age, of which the French Revolution was the central symbol. As the hopes linked with the Revolution turned to disillusionment and despair with the failure of the Revolution to fulfill its high promises, the theme of revolution was transferred from the social to the mental world. One outcome of this transfer was Wordsworth's literary revolution in his choice of poetic diction and the location of archetypes in common rather than heroic life.
{continued on Back flap)
(continued from front flap)
A similar pattern of enthusiasm followed by disillusionment is evidenced in Lionel Trilling's essay. He examines the attitude of Keats and Wordsworth toward pleasure and shows the transformation this attitude underwent in later writers. From the sense of the goodness of pleasure which is present in hoth poets, we pass to the concept of pleasure as the most dangerous enemy of the ego. Mr. Trilling illustrates his thesis ty reference to the work of Freud, Dostoevsky, and D. H. Lawrence.
Finally, Professor Wellek, in an exhaustive and erudite survey, reviews the many attempts to formulate a definition of Romanticism as it existed both in England and on the Continent. Since Romanticism is a literary term that belongs to the history of imagery rather than to the history of ideas in the sense of concepts or theses. Mr. Wellek indicates that the attempts to define the term Romanticism have been successful in proportion as they have moved away from a conceptual approach toward studying what the Romantics did with images and symbols.
The essays offer a perceptive reappraisal of a fascinating period in literary history; there is enough that is both new and important in this book to encourage the reader to reconsider Romanticism for himself. NORTHROP FRYE is Professor of English and Principal at Victoria College, Toronto. He is the author of Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry and editor of the 1956 collection of English Institute essays, Sound and Poetry.
J Vissza