Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830

This study traces the ways in which Romantic writers responded to a debate over the dangers and rewards of idle contemplation.

Richard Adelman (Author)

9780521190688, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 May 2011

220 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.5 kg

'Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 is more than a mere study of the history of these concepts; it is also an investigation into human creativity and the possibility of moral and political agency … Adelman's book is no passive read - sparks will fly in the reader's mind as well.' Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Reconstructing the literary and philosophical reaction to Adam Smith's dictum that man is a labouring animal above and before all else, this study explores the many ways in which Romantic writers presented idle contemplation as the central activity in human life. By contrasting the British response to Smith's political economy with that of contemporary German Idealists, Richard Adelman also uses this consideration of the importance of idleness to Romantic aesthetics to chart the development of a distinctly British idealism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Exploring the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and many of their contemporaries, this study pinpoints a debate over human activity and capability taking place between 1750 and 1830, and considers its social and political consequences for the cultural theory of the early nineteenth century.

Introduction
1. The division of labour
2. Utilitarian education and aesthetic education
3. Cowper, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft
4. Coleridge's pantisocracy, biographia and church and state
Conclusion
Epilogue: Wordsworth and Kingsley.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]