Orientation in European Romanticism
The Art of Falling Upwards

This book frames Romanticism as the epicentre of modern Europe's fascination with orientation and disorientation in literature and politics.

Paul Hamilton (Author)

9781009268257, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 April 2025

322 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.468 kg

'Orientation in European Romanticism lends itself to specialists and nonspecialists alike if one has the grit and raw passion for further exploration of European Romanticism and its continued aesthetic influence. This is indeed a worthy, if challenging, addition to the current critical literature on European Romanticism and aesthetics in general.' Wayne Deakin, European Romantic Review

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

Part I. Disorientating Kant: 1. Introduction: sublimity and abjection
2. Kleist and the Kant-crisis
3. Hölderlin and the philosophers
Part II. The Uses of Abjection: 4. The feminist humanism of Felicia Hemans: the poetics of Records of Woman (1828)
5. Thomas Moore and the national lyric
6. Ugo Foscolo's literary hypocrisy
Part III. Optimism and Pessimism: 7. Balzac's comic pessimism
8. George Sand's optimism
Part IV. Romancing the Modern: 9. Retrospect: Rilke translates Leopardi.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD], European history [HBJD], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]