Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose

by Tim Milnes

Overview

This ambitious study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of "indifferentism." Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. The tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521810982
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/27/2003
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #55
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. From 1998 to 2001 he was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Oxford. He has published articles on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jeremy Bentham, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, and is the author of William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Palgrave, 2009) and The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is also the co-editor, with Kerry Sinanan, of Romanticism, Sincerity, and Authenticity (Palgrave, 2010) and is a consulting editor for the journal Hazlitt Studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Romanticism's knowing ways; 1. From artistic to epistemic creation: the eighteenth century; 2. The charm of logic: Wordsworth's prose; 3. The dry romance: Hazlitt's immanent idealism; 4. Coleridge and the new foundationalism; 5. The end of knowledge: Coleridge and theosophy; Conclusion: life without knowledge; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'Milnes illuminates the relationship between Romantic philosophy and literature; in doing so, he affords new insights into contemporary approaches to cross-disciplinary criticism.' BARS Bulletin & Review

'Milnes produces a very informed and erudite consideration … a very deep and at times taxing though rewarding study … the reader is rewarded by graceful turns of phrase that convey rich insight and understanding of the very constructs of knowledge.' European Romantic Review

From the Publisher