Thomas Pfau reinterprets the evolution of British and German
Romanticism as a progress through three successive dominant moods,
each manifested in the "voice" of an historical moment. Drawing on
a multifaceted philosophical tradition ranging from Kant to Hegel
to Heidegger -- incorporating as well the psychosocial analyses of
Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno -- Pfau develops a new understanding of
the Romantic writer's voice as the formal encryption of a complex
cultural condition.
Pfau focuses on three specific paradigms of emotive experience:
paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Along the trajectory of Romantic
thought paranoia characterizes the disintegration of traditional
models of causation and representation during the French
Revolution; trauma, the radical political, cultural, and economic
restructuring of Central Europe in the Napoleonic era; and
melancholy, the dominant post-traumatic condition of stalled,
post-Napoleonic history both in England and on the continent.
Romantic Moods positions emotion as a "climate of history" to be
interpretively recovered from the discursive and imaginative
writing in which it is objectively embodied. Pfau's ambitious study
traces the evolution of Romantic interiority by exploring the
deep-seated reverberations of historical change as they become
legible in new discursive and conceptual strategies and in the
evolving formal-aesthetic construction and reception of Romantic
literature. In establishing this relationship between mood and
voice, Pfau moves away from the conventional understanding of
emotion as something "owned" or exclusively attributable to the
individual and toward a theory of mood as fundamentally
intersubjective and deserving ofbroader consideration in the study
of Romanticism.
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