The Historicity of Romantic Discourse

Description

This provocative critique of Romantic discourse will profoundly affect how readers perceive not only the Romantic writers, but also their most celebrated modern critics - such as de Man, Hartman, and McGann - who are, the author argues, themselves unwitting captives of the ideas and writings they criticize. With the Romantic redefinition of the self as a mind that grows, writing became an expressive index to that growth: the product, as we still understand it, of a developing creative imagination. Siskin argues that this imaginative mind is not a timeless producer, but a culture-specific product, not knowledge discovered in the course of mankind's inevitable progress, as Wordsworth and Keats claimed, but knowledge made at a particular point in time. As he traces the transformation of historical concepts of self and behaviour into 'natural truths', Siskin performs the political task of relating the production and reproduction of the Romantic knowledge to the workings of social, professional, and economic power. Scholars and students of English literature of the Romantic period, or of Romanticism generally.