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Sorrow Worlds : = Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Sorrow Worlds :/
Reminder of title:	Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History.
Author:	Lam, Collin D.
Description:	1 online resource (200 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-12A.
Subject:	English literature. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798379730871

Sorrow Worlds : = Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History.
Lam, Collin D.

Sorrow Worlds :Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History. - 1 online resource (200 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

Thomas Pfau has notably said of the Romantic period that it "confronted the task of awakening to its own historicity," and the Romantics approached this question of self-historicity through specific moods. Looking toward one mood in particular, melancholy's frequent association with Romanticism harbors a common assumption that the turn toward sentimentality in Romantic literature fostered a rejection of Classicism's "cult of reason." However, the apparent ubiquity of melancholy within the Romantic period has not been sufficiently investigated within Romantic scholarship, except in piecemeal readings of specific authors, or in an overgeneralized sense of negative feeling that focuses on its capriciousness and indolence. My dissertation addresses and dismisses these reactive readings by tracing melancholy's far more expansive and creative relationship to how the Romantics reconceived of history, whether in the context of forming personal, collective, or national histories. By first drawing on the interweaving connections between German idealism's negative conditions of experience, nature, and history, I map those foundations of loss and negation alongside their literary adoptions in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The import of German idealism's negative structures of existence transforms into a unique understanding of melancholy within Romantic literary consciousness. Melancholy was seen to be both the condition and critical methodology of history itself for the Romantics. Far more than a mere representation of feeling, the frequency of Romantic depictions of melancholy comes, I argue, from the Romantics' distrust of a stable external and historical world, leading them to imagine futures and new worlds from a foundation of inevitable destruction and ruin. Specifically, I call this practice "affective worlding." Similarly, the history of the modern nation and Romantic unity, conceived of in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract and William Blake's figures of Los and Albion, offer models of community that rely on loss, fragmentation, and melancholic abdications of natural power. In the last place, I propose an open-ended tracing of these analyses of melancholy in the Romantic period to postmodernism and other contemporary discourses to show how they continue the legacy of Romantic melancholy through a reading of Mary Shelley's The Last Man.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798379730871Subjects--Topical Terms:

555406
English literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Affective worldingIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Sorrow Worlds : = Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History.
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