Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism

by Alexander Regier

Overview

What associates fragmentation with Romanticism? In this book, Alexander Regier explains how fracture and fragmentation form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism can be analysed in a particularly effective way. These categories also supply a critical framework for a discussion of fundamental issues concerning language and thought in the period. Over the course of the volume, Regier discusses fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, offering new readings of Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period. He also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man. More generally, Regier's discussion of fragmentation exposes a philosophical problem that lies behind the definition of Romanticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780511847233
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2010
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #81
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	462 KB

About the Author

Alexander Regier is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University.

Table of Contents

Broken origins: an introduction; 1. A brotherhood is broken: Babel and the fragmentation of language; 2. Figuring it out: the origin of language and anthropomorphism; 3. Forces trembling underneath: the Lisbon earthquake and the sublime; 4. A blue chasm: Wordsworth's The Prelude and the figure of parenthesis; 5. Letters from the grave: John Keats's fragmented corpus; 6. The doubling force of citation: De Quincey's Wordsworthian archive; 7. Philological fractures: Paul de Man's Romantic rhetoric.

Editorial Reviews

"The book presents an incisive and resourceful intervention in current critical debates around Romantic culture, and Regier's consistently sophisticated and often illuminating readings repay careful attention as well as detailed critical engagement."
—Review 19

"Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism is clear and persuasive, and provides a fresh way of thinking through the importance of Romanticism then and now."
—The Year's Work in English Studies

"Alexander Regier uses fracture and fragmentation as lenses through which Romanticism can be approached and analysed, so that the result is not only knowledge about Tomanticism but also knowledge about ourselves."
—The European Legacy

"His book argues forcefully for a central paradox in Romantic writing: its frequent articulation of fantasies of plenitude "that turn out to be broken in their origin or hide a fracture at their centre"(p.25)."
—Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

From the Publisher