Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism

Stauffer, Andrew M.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511484506

Cited by 37 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Suicide signified protest against tyranny partly through the slave‐suicides reported in anti‐abolition literature of the 18th century and the widely reported suicides of the French Revolutionaries. Thus, Andrew Stauffer's Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (2005) and Jacques Khalip's Anonymous Life : Romanticism and Dispossession (2009) set the stage for a consideration of how suicide, as a violent act of self‐negation, may be read as the ultimate form of the individual's assertion of autonomy in the face of tyranny. Also essential to this discussion is R. S. White's Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (2005), which posits that the establishment of laws regarding personal freedom, of which bodily autonomy was one, was a formative influence on Romanticism as a movement.…”

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Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Faubert

Reynolds

2015

Literature Compass

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This essay introduces the issue of Literature Compass that explores the topic of female suicide and Romantic literature, culture, and criticism. Although little critical work has been published on suicide and Romanticism to date, the subject addresses concerns that several major recent works on Romanticism have studied, such as the body and medicine, psychology, violence, and protest against political and domestic tyranny. Historically, too, the topic of Romanticism and suicide appears tangentially in well-known scholarship about melancholy, madness, genius, the sublime, and the transcendental. As the articles in this issue make clear, female suicide in the Romantic era emerges as a powerful trope through which a range of discourses -aesthetic, scientific, religious, philosophical, and political -converge to manage the culture's most unknowable, recalcitrant subjects and bodies, women and subalterns chief among these. By exploring the ways in which current and established criticism has touched on issues related to Romanticism and suicide, and in particular female suicide, this introduction argues for the timely relevance of the topic and highlights new directions for further inquiry.This special issue of Literature Compass was born of a panel organized at the NASSR 2013 conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference theme was "Romantic Movements," and our panel, "Gesture, Exile, and Agency in Romantic Representations of Female Suicide," explored suicide's itinerant and gestural qualities. Our papers focused on how, whether in selfimposed or compulsory exile, suicidal protagonists ranging from Shelley's Matilda, Owenson's Luxima, and Hemans's Sappho articulate, in Hemans's words, both "boundless love" and "fiery thought": a fusion of passion and reason, the sentimental and the political, that belies the era's prevailing assumptions about women's proclivities and capacities.Although our focus was, therefore, rather specific, C. C. Wharram and other audience members noted that our panel, which occupied the final time-slot of the conference, commented on many of the themes that other conferees' papers had investigated in the panels that had come before ours. The broad conference theme of "Romantic Movements" had inspired a host of presentations on "marginal or exceptional states of existence that are, because of their marginality, at the same time constitutive of that existence," as Joel Faf lak would note in his invitation to edit this special issue. Taken together, the papers in our panel explored the relationship between female suicide and female self-construction, proceeding from the understanding that, within patriarchy, cultural and political marginalization codifies the essential/existential otherness of female subjectivity. Like woman, death too "lie[s] outside the frame of the 'known' "; the compounded uncanniness of the female suicide "interrogat[es] the processes of social construction" and renders strange the familiar narratives about what makes life worth living (Higonnet, "Frames" 229, 241). Explor...

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Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Faubert

Reynolds

2015

Literature Compass

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“…6 6 See, for example, Andrew Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 110–32; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, 98–134.…”

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“…Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, 98–134. For more general studies on Shelley’s political poetics, see Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry .…”

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“…For more general studies on Shelley’s political poetics, see Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre .…”

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“…Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley .…”

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Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ and the Problem of Modern Sovereignty

Kuiken

2011

Literature Compass

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Shelley’s political poem, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, was written in 1819 after the event known as the ‘massacre at Peterloo’. It attempts to galvanize the reform movement’s resistance to what he saw as the illegitimate power of the British government. Because the poem was deemed too radical to publish in the wake of government repression after the massacre, it raises the question of how to judge the political efficacy of a text beyond the immediate historical context for which it was intended. Recent criticism has sought to locate this efficacy in the tensions between the poem’s formal poetics and the specific political proposals that it seems to advance. This article revisits the need for this approach by proposing that the political efficacy of the ‘Mask of Anarchy’ must also be measured in terms of the way that it articulates two different relations to the paradox of modern political sovereignty which, no longer based on a transcendent foundation such as divine right, must include within its institution a finite act of self‐grounding. Drawing on recent theoretical debates about the nature of modern sovereignty, I argue that Shelley’s poem demonstrates two different relationships to this act of self‐grounding: one that produces an illegitimate form of sovereignty, and a second that recognizes the contingency of its own institution. I then go on to consider how these two different conceptions of sovereignty help clarify and sharpen the specific nature of the poem’s political efficacy.

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2014

Romanticism

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Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism

Cited by 37 publications

References 39 publications

Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ and the Problem of Modern Sovereignty

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