Romanticism and the Human Sciences
Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species

This book, first published in 2000, examines Romantic poetry in relation to the philosophical, political and anthropological discourse of the period.

Maureen N. McLane (Author)

9780521028202, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

296 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.445 kg

"A book of wide scope and intellectual ambition." RedNova News

This study, published in 2000, examines the dialogue between Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, by analysing their work in relation to discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology. Writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley explored the possibilities and limits of human being, language and hope. They engaged with the work of theorisers of the human sciences - Malthus, Godwin and Burke among them. The book offers original readings of canonical works, including Lyrical Ballads, Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, to show how the Romantics internalised and transformed ideas about the imagination, perfectibility, immortality and population which so energised contemporary moral and political debates. McLane provides a defence of poetry in both Romantic and contemporary theoretical terms, reformulating the predicament of Romanticism in general and poetry in particular.

Acknowledgements
Introduction, or the thing at hand
1. Toward an anthropologic: poetry, literature, and the discourse of the species
2. Do rustics think? Wordworth, Coleridge, and the problem of a 'human diction'
3. Literate species: populations, 'humanities', and the specific failure of literature in Frankenstein
4. The 'arithmetic of futurity': poetry, population, and the structure of the future
5. Dead poets and other romantic populations: immortality and its discontents
Epilogue, or Immortality interminable: the use of poetry for life
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]