Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism

This book explains why 'fracture' and 'fragmentation' are two crucial concepts in Romanticism.

Alexander Regier (Author)

9781107411777, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 November 2012

258 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]