The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol

Nicholas Halmi author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:29th Nov '07

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The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol cover

Despite its widely acknowledged importance in and beyond the thought of the Romantic period, the distinctive concept of the symbol articulated by such writers as Goethe and F. W. J. Schelling in Germany and S. T. Coleridge in England has defied adequate historical explanation. In contrast to previous scholarship, Nicholas Halmi's study provides such an explanation by relating the content of Romantic symbolist theory - often criticized as irrationalist - to the cultural needs of its time. Because its genealogical method eschews a single disciplinary perspective, this study is able to examine the Romantic concept of the symbol in a broader intellectual context than previous scholarship, a context ranging chronologically from classical antiquity to the present and encompassing literary criticism and theory, aesthetics, semiotics, theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, astronomy, poetry, and the origins of landscape painting. The concept is thus revealed to be a specifically modern response to modern discontents, neither reverting to pre-modern modes of thought nor secularizing Christian theology, but countering Enlightenment dualisms with means bequeathed by the Enlightenment itself. This book seeks, in short, to do for the Romantic symbol what Percy Bysshe Shelley called on poets to do for the world: to lift from it its veil of familiarity.

The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol is a really fine book, and one that anyone interested in Romantic literary theory will find absorbing. Halmi draws on an impressively wide range of authorities; he gathers a complex argument into pages of pleasurable lucidity; and he pursues his quarry with grace. * Seamus Perry, The Wordsworth Circle *
innovative... a brilliant and original study that is essential reading for scholars of the Romantic period. * Orianne Smith, Year's Work in English Studies *
an important contribution to Romantic scholarship. * Carol Tully, The Modern Language Review *
This book offers one of the most profound reflections on symbol since Paul de Man: subtle, original and provocative. It is a brief book, but extremely rich, and often brilliant. This is history of ideas as it ought to be written. * Michael John Kooy, THES *
Halmi's book will take its place before long among the indespensable contributions to Romantic studies * Uttara Natarajan, Notes and Queries *

ISBN: 9780199212415

Dimensions: 223mm x 145mm x 18mm

Weight: 403g

216 pages