Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency"Fatal Autonomy is a subtle, gracefully written, and politically astute reading of selected plays by the canonical Romantic poets. Jewett offers the most original and carefully circumscribed formulations to date of the interaction between language and politics as it is depicted in Romantic drama."--Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara Describing an enduring moral puzzle and explaining how it helped to shape a key moment in the history of poetic drama, Fatal Autonomy represents Romanticism as a reckoning with the costs of individual agency. No moral calculus can ever fully determine the relation of events to an individual's actions and failures to act, William Jewett argues; that is why the stubborn belief in such a relationship gives rise to tragedy. Jewett maintains that tragic drama forces its readers and viewers to confront the ways in which the use of language grants agency. The Romantic poets saw a moral challenge in that confrontation and followed its generic implications toward a new kind of poetry. Fatal Autonomy thus looks to Romantic drama to explain how Romantic poetry came to hold a permanent grip on conceptions of moral life. Tracing the source of major strains in British Romanticism to a politically charged body of dramatic poems, Jewett focuses on two historical moments: 1794-97, which he describes as the political turning point in the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and 1819-22, the years in which he believes Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron wrote their best poetry. |
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... called " the circulation of social energy " -converge in the moral problems of individual persons . Every piece of language , Greenblatt reminds us , is at some level collectively produced ; but dra- matic language acknowledges the ...
... called " deliberate . " We learn what happens to Robespierre partly from act 3's pivotal stage directions , which , though they are few , become oddly prominent considering that we see no action . These point typically to activity ...
... called the scene " one of the most novel and picturesque we re- member to have witnessed , " placing an invisible irony - mark , perhaps , over " picturesque " ( 18 : 465 ) . The variety of possible reactions follows , I believe , from ...
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Part One Tragic Agents and | 21 |
The Borderers | 58 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown