The volume explores the interrelated topics of transnational identity in all its ambiguity and complexity, and the new ways of imagining community or Gemeinschaft (as distinct from society or Gesellschaft)) that this broader climate made possible in the Romantic period. The period crystallized, even if it did not inaugurate, an unprecedented interest in travel and exploration, as well as in the dissemination of the knowledge thus acquired through print media and learned societies. This dissemination expanded but also unmoored both epistemic and national boundaries. It thus led to what Antoine Berman in his study of translation tellingly calls ?the experience of the foreign, ? as a zone of differences between and within selves, of which translation was the material expression and symptom. As several essays in the collection suggest, it is this mental travel that distinguishes the Romantic probing of transitional zones from that of earlier periods when travel and exploration were more purely under the sign of trade and commerce and thus of appropriation and colonization. The renegotiation of national and cultural boundaries also raises the question of what kinds of community are possible in this environment. A group of essays therefore explores the period's alternative communities, and the ways in which it tested the limits of the very concept of community. Finally, the volume also explores the interrelationship between notions of identity and community by turning to Romantic theatre. Concentrating on the stage as monitor and mirror of contemporary ideological developments, a dedicated section of this book looks at the evolution of the tragic in European Romanticisms and how its inherent conflicts became vehicles for contrasting representations of individual and communal identities.

This book was published as a special issue of European Romantic Review

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism offers a wide-ranging dialogue between theory and German Idealism, joining up the various lines of influence connecting German Idealist and Romantic philosophies in all their variety to post-'68 European philosophies, from Derrida and Deleuze to Žižek and Malabou.   Key features: Provides in-depth reflections on the various conversations between German Idealism and theory, including an expanded canon of Idealist philosophers and a wide range of contemporary anti-foundationalist thinkers. Includes marginalized voices and concepts that reflect both contemporary concerns as well as the sheer abundance of readings of German Idealism undertaken by European theorists over the last fifty years. Expands the existing scholarship by focusing on new, future directions emerging out of the idealism-theory relationship. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism is essential reading for researchers and students of all levels — from senior scholars to advanced undergraduates — working on the legacy of German Idealist philosophers within philosophy departments, as well as all those interested in theory from across the humanities.

This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction's continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its "constitutive loss" of phenomenology (in Judith Butler's phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre's forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought.

This collection addresses Esposito's long-standing engagement with early modern philosophy, philosophy of biology, biopolitics, the impolitical and the impersonal as well as significant dialogues with contemporary philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. A new essay by Esposito himself reveals the importance of philosophical sources and ideas that condition his thinking, especially outside and beyond the dominant biopolitical interpretative framework that has come to mark his reception in the English-speaking world.Readers are invited to reposition Esposito's thought and explore the interdisciplinarity and unique methodology of his whole corpus.

This collection invites readers to reposition Esposito's thought and explore the interdisciplinarity and unique methodology of his whole corpus. It addresses Esposito's long-standing engagement with early modern philosophy, philosophy of biology, biopolitics, and the impolitical and the impersonal, together with his significant dialogues with contemporary philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. A new essay by Esposito himself reveals the importance of philosophical sources and ideas that condition his thinking, especially outside and beyond the dominant biopolitical interpretative framework that has come to mark his reception in the English-speaking world.

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century.

While engaging both genres, "Romantic Narrative" responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that "poiesis," as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism's legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley's "Alastor" and his Gothic novels, Godwin's "Caleb Williams" and "St. Leon," Hays' "Memoirs of Emma Courtney," and Wollstonecraft's "The Wrongs of Woman."

Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism's leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, "Romantic Narrative" will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory.

This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction's continuing relevance.
The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its "constitutive loss" of phenomenology (in Judith Butler's phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre's forgotten but seminal "Being and Nothingness") is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought.

Romanticism has often been associated with lyric poetry, or otherwise confined within mainstream genres. As a result, we have neglected the sheer diversity and generic hybridity of a literature that ranged from the Gothic novel to the national tale, from monthly periodicals to fictionalized autobiography. In this new volume some of the leading scholars of the period explore the relationship between ideology and literary genre from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The introduction offers a fresh examination of how genre was rethought by Romantic criticism.

Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.

Godwin's Mandeville, published in 1817, was described as his best novel by Shelley, who sent a copy to Byron, and it was recognized by its admirers as a work of unique psychological power. As Shelley wrote in a letter to Godwin, the novel's interest is of "that irresistible and overwhelming kind." Written one year after the battle of Waterloo and set in an earlier revolutionary period between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, Mandeville is a novel of psychological warfare. The narrative proceeds through Mandeville's early education by a fanatical Presbyterian minister to his persecution at Winchester school, his constant (and not unjustified) paranoia, and his confinement in an asylum. Mandeville's final, desperate attempt to prevent his sister's marriage to his enemy ends in tragedy. The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, material elucidating the novel's complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.

Romanticism has often been associated with the mode of lyric, or otherwise confined within mainstream genres. As a result, we have neglected the sheer diversity and generic hybridity of a literature that ranged from the Gothic novel to the national tale, from monthly periodicals to fictionalized autobiography. In this volume leading scholars of the period explore the ways in which the Romantics developed genre from a taxonomical given into a cultural category, so as to make it the scene of an ongoing struggle between fixed norms and new initiatives. Focusing on non-canonical writers (such as Thelwall, Godwin and the novelists of the 1790s), or placing authors such as Wordsworth and Byron in a non-canonical context, these essays explore the psychic and social politics of genre from a variety of theoretical perspectives, while the introduction looks at how genre itself was rethought by Romantic criticism.

William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake's imagination - often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive - offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change. A hybrid of text and image, Blake's writings and illuminations offer a disturbing and productive exception to accepted aesthetic, social, and political norms. Accordingly, the essays in this volume, reflecting Blake's unorthodox perspective, challenge past and present critical approaches in order to explore his oeuvre from multiple perspectives: literary studies, critical theory, intellectual history, science, art history, philosophy, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Covering the full range of Blake's output from the shorter prophecies to his final poems, the essays in William Blake: Modernity and Disaster predict the discontents of modernity by reading Blake as a prophetic figure alert to the ends of history. His legacy thus provides a lesson in thinking and living through the present in order to ask what it might mean to envision a different future, or any future at all.

"Idealism without Absolutes offers an ambitious and broad reconsideration of idealism in relation to Romanticism and subsequent thought. Linking idealist and Romantic philosophy to contemporary theory, the volume explores the multiplicity of different philosophical incarnations of idealism and materialism, and shows how they mix with and invade each other in philosophy and culture. The contributors discuss a wide range of major figures in the long Romantic period, from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, as well as key figures defining the contemporary intellectual debate, including Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Lyotard, Derrida, de Man, and Deleuze and Guattari. While preserving the significance of the historical period extending from Kant to the early nineteenth century, the volume gives the concept of Romantic culture a new historical and philosophical meaning that extends from its pre-Kantian past to our own culture and beyond.