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. |
From inside the book
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... poetry . And it is the force of circumstance that often triggers anxieties about agency . Unlike Orwell , however , who betrays an aversion to whatever threatens his beliefs about human freedom , the Romantic poets sought to understand ...
... poets considered in this book were not so sure . The Romantic poets wrote and read dramas to understand how we come to take others , and ourselves , as moral and political agents , and why we sometimes refuse to do so . For drama , by ...
... poem , and a dramatic Poem , and ... it is both unfair and absurd to attribute to the Poet , as a man all the sentiments he puts in the mouth of his characters . " 54 He went on to claim that those sentiments , far from being contagious ...
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
Part One Tragic Agents and | 21 |
The Borderers | 58 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown