Rhetorical and Cultural Dissolution in Romanticism - Vol 95, no. 3

The essays collected here offer incisive analyses of the historical and ideological formation of English Romanticism and of its rhetorical and cultural "dissolution." Beginning with the radical millenarianism of the early 1790s and extending through the late-nineteenth-century reception of Romantic gothicism, the texts of this aesthetic-that-is-not-one are examined from diverse critical orientations.

The early Blake is contextualized within the competing spiritual and secular strategies of 1790s radical representation, for example, while the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" is read as a holographic aesthetic medium for dissolution, and Blake's "agitation" is analyzed via Kant's late writings and recent theoretical work by Lyotard.

Other essays address Romanticism at the macrohistorical level by rethinking its emergence as a distinctive, self-conscious cultural movement in conjunction with momentous fiscal-policy shifts between 1795 and 1803, or by exploring the convergence of poetics and political economy in Wordsworth's and Malthus's similarly antiurban/antitheatical/antifeminist representations of the city.

Romantic psychology, encoded in narrative and lyric texts, is explored in one essay through the sexual/philosophical dialetic that leads "Frankenstein" to recoil from its monstrous act of creation only to confront the specter of its interminability; another essay, applying Kristevan abjection to the Wordsworth-Coleridge collaboration, reconstructs the historicity of Romantic desire.

Various enactments of erotic and social/class desire are also staged here through the psychodynamics of Romantic theater, with "queer performativity" closeted in the West End and phantom pain disfigured at the Paris Opera.