| These essays propose that an intentional strangeness makes several Romantic texts productively remote from both the dominant metaphysics of the period and that of our own time. These Romantic texts are intentionally strange in the sense that they are artifacts of Romantic resistance to incipient theorizations of meaning, language, experience, history, time, and space, which were fresh for Romantic authors but have ossified into our unexamined background today. Because of our changed relationship to these theorizations, our criticism tends to discard Romantic resistance as mystification, as if Romantic writers simply did not grasp what for us is obvious. The title term "Romantic Theory" reflects my postulate, pursued in readings of Coleridge and Shelley, that figurative resources of Romantic poetry and prose can inform current theoretical questions, often by transforming or circumventing their terms. But in order to arrive at the transformative power of Romantic theory, we must first disentangle the relevant texts from a critical history of misreading. Accordingly, the strategy of this project involves alternating between, on the one hand, metacritical discussions of watershed critical receptions that have made the Romantic text illegible, and, on the other hand, historically informed close-reading that attempts to discover how the text struggled against incipient, but already powerful, theorizations, often straining against the limits of what could sensibly be said, and so often generating novel expressive and theoretical resources.;To suggest the fertility of this approach, I examine several Romantic cruxes where major theorizations are put forward. Chapter 1 argues that Coleridge's discussion of symbol and allegory in Statesman's Manual is more cogent than generally thought by showing how the distinction between allegory and symbol is a distinction between figurative and nonfigurative meaning. Chapter 2 dissents from the consensus view that Chapter 12 of Coleridge's Biographia offers a cogent theory (of fancy and imagination) and proposes a very different interest in the passage. Chapter 3 discovers a new, nonmethodologically obsessed historicism in Shelley's Defense. Chapter 4 develops a fresh reception of Shelley's critique of calculation, one rooted in a radical rejection of Industrial consciousness and experience. |
