Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose

This 2003 study sheds light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the problems of knowledge.

Tim Milnes (Author)

9780521810982, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 February 2003

292 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

'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

This 2003 study sheds light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge, particularly as they inherited them from the philosopher David Hume. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth century to answer empirical scepticism had produced a culture of 'indifferentism'. Tim Milnes explores the way in which Romantic writers extended this epistemic indifference through their resistance to argumentation, and finds that it exists in a perpetual state of tension with a compulsion to know. This 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. Milnes argues that it is in their oscillation between knowledge and indifference that the Romantics prefigure the ambivalent negotiations of modern post-analytic philosophy.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]