Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences
Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age

This book discusses how Romantic-age writers and new cultural institutions transformed ideas of knowledge inherited from the early-modern period.

Jon Klancher (Author)

9781107029101, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 August 2013

324 pages, 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.61 kg

'Consistently interesting and closely researched …' Adrian Tait, British Society for Literature and Science (bsls.ac.uk)

In this important and innovative study, Jon Klancher shows how the Romantic age produced a new discourse of the 'Arts and Sciences' by reconfiguring the Enlightenment's idea of knowledge and by creating new kinds of cultural institutions with unprecedented public impact. He investigates the work of poets, lecturers, moral philosophers, scientists and literary critics - including Coleridge, Godwin, Bentham, Davy, Wordsworth, Robinson, Shelley and Hunt - and traces their response to book collectors and bibliographers, art-and-science administrators, painters, engravers, natural philosophers, radical journalists, editors and reviewers. Taking a historical and cross-disciplinary approach, he opens up Romantic literary and critical writing to transformations in the history of science, history of the book, art history, and the little-known history of arts-and-sciences administration that linked early-modern projects to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modes of organizing 'knowledges'. His conclusions transform the ways we think about knowledge, both in the Romantic period and in our own.

Introduction
Part I. Questions of the Arts and Sciences: 1. From the age of projects to the age of institutions
2. The administrator as cultural producer: restructuring the arts and sciences
3. Wild bibliography: the rise and fall of book history in the nineteenth century
4. Print and institution in the making of art controversy
5. History and organization in the Romantic-age sciences
Part II. Questions of the Literary: 6. The Coleridge Institution
7. Dissension in the arts and sciences
Epilogue: transatlantic crossings
Bibliography
Notes.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]