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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... figure that has itself " dried away / The source from which it sprung . " What we might take as a sign that Beatrice understands Lucretia's figure could just as easily be taken as a mechanical replication of the figure that divorces the ...
... figure reverses its significance in passing it from earlier to later writers . Traditionally a hierarch's figure for the threat to hierarchy , it is used by Byron's doge , in addressing the men who would be masterless , to imagine the ...
... figure of Rousseau in The Triumph of Life derives , in important ways , from the figure of Alexander Leighton in Charles the First . In order to understand the significance of Rousseau , it is essential to un- derstand the importance of ...
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Part One Tragic Agents and | 21 |
The Borderers | 58 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown