Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism s Quotidian
Sublime undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and
experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the
focus from Burke s and Kant s prescriptions of natural vastness and
grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous spaces, objects and
experiences of everyday life.
This shift is defined as a descent from mountaintops to an
encounter, in William Blake s terms, with 'a World in a Grain of
Sand.' The purpose of this book is to sift the literature of the
Romantic everyday, both prose and poetry, canonical and
noncanonical, for such grains. In order to define the inherently
amorphous and subsumptive sphere called 'everyday life, ' the
author draws upon two main theoretical threads: the first, based on
the phenomenological poetics of Gaston Bachelard, serves to
elucidate the depth and diversity of everyday household space; the
second, comprising the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de
Certeau, defines the generative potential, what de Certeau glosses
as the 'everyday creativity, ' of some of the most basic human
activities such as walking, reading and washing, to name but a few.
The role of the everyday in Romantic literature has in recent years
received greater scholarly attention, particularly from critics
dissatisfied with the perpetuation of what Karina Williamson
characterizes as a 'debased Romanticism which rules there is a
category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the
rest is ordinary and inadmissible.' The present study serves to map
the intersections of these categories of experience and expression
the sublime and the quotidian and thereby to challenge our
assumptions about the aesthetic value of the everyday not only in
the Romantic period but also in our own. "
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