Numéro 54, may 2009

EN :

The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at Romanticism’s arch ‘infidel’, Thomas Paine. My approach is to place his key work The Age of Reason (1795) in the context of what Derrida in Spectres of Marx calls ‘spectropolitics’. Derrida coins this term to describe the way in which ‘effectivity phantamolizes itself,’ and I want to use Derrida’s insight to explore the specifically visual dimension of Paine’s ‘phantomal’ image. I will show that there are three components to the spectropolitical transformation of Paine: his demonization in the 1790s as the diabolical seducer of the common reader; his ‘resuscitation’ in the post-war period by Richard Carlile and other ‘apostles’; and the ironic conjunction between this contested ‘apotheosis’ of Paine and his Deistical debunking of Christian revelation as vulgar spectacle. I focus my discussion around George Cruikshank’s print The Age of Reason (1819) in order to show that caricature was a major spectropolitical force in the Romantic period and the apposite cultural medium for negatively ‘phantamolizing’ Paine, though this tactic always ran the risk of further enhancing his ‘cult’ status in radical martyrology. The larger critical aim of the article is to open up a new area in Romantic studies: to redefine Romanticism in terms of ‘spectropolitics’ gives popular visual media such as caricature a primary rather than secondary critical function, and it allows us to rethink and revalue the ‘phantasmagoric’ transformation of Romantic politics and culture.

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In 1841 John Murray published a sumptuously ornamented edition of John Gibson Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads. Murray’s new edition, printed using the very latest bookmaking technologies and pitched at a readership newly accustomed to paying exorbitant prices for book ornaments and illustrations, was radically different from the first edition of Lockhart’s ballads, which had appeared without accompanying ornament in 1823. Illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day and decorated throughout in multiple colors by the architect Owen Jones (who would go on to become famous as a Superintendent of the Great Exhibition and the author of The Grammar of Ornament), Murray’s edition represents a stunning departure in Victorian printing and a highpoint in mid-Victorian design generally. At the same time, it crystallizes a debate about the nature and application of artistic design that was beginning to emerge in the early years of Victoria’s reign and that would erupt with maximum vigor ten years later in the confrontation between John Ruskin and the South Kensington School. The tension between flat, stylized design and what Ruskin was later to term “truth to nature” is already palpable in the conflict between illustrations and ornaments to Murray’s book. However, it was the involvement of Owen Jones that especially distinguished the volume, as it gave Jones the opportunity to demonstrate in a practical way ideas about design, color, and style that he would theorize fifteen years later in The Grammar of Ornament. Those ideas are especially resonant today, given recent work on the history of the book and the “bibliographic codes” of literature, since the effect of Jones’s work is to expose the textual condition of Lockhart’s poetry itself and to harness the eye as an active constituent in the act of reading. Fifty years before the work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Jones and Murray showed Victorian readers that a printed book might be a thing of real beauty and that poetry, no less than painting or architecture, is dependent on the perceptual structure of its textual vehicle.

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The American poetess and abolitionist Lucy Hooper (1816-1841) was the first North American to publish a poem inspired by Blake’s prophetic imagination, “The Fairy’s Funeral” (1833), which transforms the famous anecdote about Blake witnessing a fairy funeral into a visionary lyric. This essay provides a brief introduction to Hooper, perhaps best-known as the subject of Whittier’s elegy “On the Death of Lucy Hooper” (1841), situates her in a literary milieu of British Romantic poets that includes Hemans, Landon, Byron and Clare, discusses how an American poetess from Brooklyn might have learned about Blake and his work, and reads “The Fairy’s Funeral” as a critique of Blake’s often violent representation of fairies and flowers.

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This essay examines how the Aeolian harp functions as a model for the workings of the human nervous system as understood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It sets out the scientific contexts – ranging from Hartleyan associationism to medical theories regarding the origin of life – that informed, in particular, two of Coleridge’s best-known poems: “The Aeolian Harp” and “Dejection: An Ode.” The essay provides a materialist account of mind, emphasising its inseparability from the body and physical world, as a corrective to the tendency in past criticism to overemphasize the transcendental aspect of the Romantic worldview and its attendant poetics. Further, it develops the insights of critics such as Jonathan Crary who have previously focused on optical instruments and vision by turning instead to a sonorous model for the self.

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First-generation Romantic poets generally hold a deeply rooted faith in the notion of the limitless nature of possibility, and in reaction to Enlightenment determinism, several of these poets strive for an understanding and representation of nature that is divorced from Enlightenment notions of causality. This essay specifically explores William Wordsworth’s poetic denunciation of such deterministic accounts of causality through an investigation of The Prelude’s (1799, 1805, 1850) complication of the assumption that the natural effect can be traced backward towards a single identifiable cause. I argue that in place of this principle of sufficient reason, Wordsworth embraces the notion of “chance” as possessing the inexhaustible powers of difference. In accordance with his fascination with the potentialities of the novel infinite, the idea of “chance” allows Wordsworth to challenge the notion of “necessity,” or the philosophic claim that steadfast and orderly laws determine all events in space and time. While Wordsworth certainly does not argue with the notion that cause-effect chains can be traced temporally back in time, such a genealogical record, he suggests, can only ever be deduced and constructed a posteriori. Only after the fact of its historical instantiation can the genealogical record of causal relations be deciphered and inscribed, he indicates. Such a genealogy, then, in no way undermines a faith in chance. Rather, according to Wordsworth, the record only makes the idea of chance all the more manifest. Such a posteriori inscriptions provide a distillation of the concept of chance. In this causal record Wordsworth locates the phantom outlines left in chance’s conceptual wake, or perhaps better stated, through the specters of the idea of chance.

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This article explores the scientific and literary work of William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865). Hamilton was recognised as one of the finest scientists of his generation, and he made lasting contributions to the discipline that eventually became known as ‘physics’. In addition, though, he was fascinated by the relationship between mathematics and poetry. He wrote extensively about this subject, and, from 1827 onwards, he sustained a close friendship with Wordsworth who provided detailed critical analyses of Hamilton’s own poems. Influenced by these revealing exchanges, Hamilton identified poetical qualities in physical and mathematical treatises, and this article probes his views concerning these perceived interconnections with reference to other ‘Romantic’ scientists such as Humphry Davy. In particular, Hamilton’s striking claim that a text such as Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s Mécanique Analytique (1788) can be viewed as ‘a kind of scientific poem’ is assessed.

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Building on Bakhtinian approaches to Wordsworth’s early poems, we extend their findings to The Prelude, using analytical tools from narratology and film criticism to trace the interplay of different views and voices. By dramatising his narrator and his problems in suturing together past and present and the viewpoints of the young “hero” and the older narrator, Wordsworth the poet is continuing his project of educating an active taste. The narrator demonstrates the processes of the imagination but in ways that reveal its artifice for others to use. The gaps and uncertainties which critics often see as suppressions are invitations for the reader to exercise a revisionary activity of his own in recognising the possibility of different stories from that which the narrator tries to tell. We analyse visual images for their dissonant suggestions and the manipulations of viewpoint that problematize any secure unity of purpose other than that of suturing the reader into the creative community that Wordsworth hails at the conclusion.