The Persistence of Romanticism

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither emptily literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say.

• Unusual combination of literature and philosophy (as in NUSSBAUM/Fragility of Goodness, and, CAVELL/Must We Mean What We Say) • Eldridge pretty well known in philosophy and aesthetics (he is editor of a collection Beyond Representation/Cambridge/1996) • First serious philosophical defense of Romanticism

1. Introduction: the persistence of Romanticism; Part I. Kant and Post-Kantian Romanticism: 2. Kant, Hölderlin, and the experience of longing; 3. Kant and the value of absolute music; 4. How is the Kantian moral criticism of literature possible?; 5. Hölderlin’s ethical thinking: ‘the processes of the actual’ in ‘Heidelberg’; 6. Internal transcendentalism: Wordsworth and ‘a new condition of philosophy’; Part II. Twentieth Century Philosophical Romanticisms: Wittgenstein, Cavell and the arts: 7. Hypotheses, criterial claims, and perspicuous representations: Wittgenstein’s ‘remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough’; 8. How can tragedy matter for us?; 9. Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts; 10. ‘A continuing task’: Cavell and the truth of skepticism; 11. Plights of embodied soul: dramas of sin and salvation in Augustine and Updike; 12. Cavell and Hölderlin on human immigrancy.