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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Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency William Jewett. This critical procedure follows the lead of Coleridge's dedicatory note : " In the execution of the work , " he wrote , " as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted ...
... follows I will try to make out a best case for it . But to follow out the political consequences of the play's psychological involutions means passing from the apparent autonomy Rivers shares with his creator to the discourse of social ...
... follow Peck in reproducing Shelley's brackets and braces . Another annotation reads : " How beautiful the language / of ... follows . Mary includes “ Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing ” in her reading list for 1815 ( see Newman I ...
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Part One Tragic Agents and | 21 |
The Borderers | 58 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown