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Overview
Taking Walter Benjamin’s thinking about history as a point of departure, the author shows how the model for Romantic prophecy emerges less as a prediction of the future than as a call to change in the present, even as it quotes, at key turns, texts from the past. After surveying developments in eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, as well as the numerous instances of prophetic eruption in Romantic poetry, the book culminates in close readings of works by Blake, Hölderlin, and Coleridge.
Each of these writers interpreted the Bible in strong, variously radical and conservative ways, and each reworked prophetic texts in often startling fashion. The author’s reading of Blake focuses on the complex temporal and rhetorical dynamics at work in a prophetic tradition, with attention paid to the key mediating figure of Milton. The chapter on Hölderlin investigates the truth-claim of poetry and the consequences of Hölderlin’s insight into the necessarily figural character of poetry. The analysis of Coleridge correlates his theory of allegory and symbol with his theory and practice of political writing, which often relies on mobilizing prophetic authority. Together, the readings force us to reexamine the claims and practices of Romantic poets and thinkers and their ideas and ideologies, not without engendering some allegorical resonance with issues in our own time.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780804745062 |
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Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
Publication date: | 08/20/2002 |
Series: | Cultural Memory in the Present |
Edition description: | 1 |
Pages: | 368 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
1 | Introduction: The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin) | 1 |
2 | The Scope and Texture of Romantic Prophecy: Wordsworth and Novalis Among Others | 19 |
Part I | Prophetic Figures in Eighteenth-Century Interpretation | |
3 | Robert Lowth and the Temporality of Prophetic Rhetoric | 55 |
4 | The Speaking Hieroglyph: Hurd, Warburton, and the Matter of Style | 82 |
5 | Herder and Eichhorn: Word, Deed, and Fiction in Prophetic Discourse | 106 |
Part II | Readings in Prophetic Writing | |
6 | The Mediated Vision: Blake, Milton, and the Lines of Prophetic Tradition | 127 |
7 | Holderlin's Moment of Truth: "Germanien" and the Oracle to the Nation (With an Excursus on Revelation, Representation, and Religion in the Age of German Idealism) | 173 |
8 | Allegories of the Symbol: Rhetoric, Politics, and Prophecy in Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual | 250 |
Notes | 287 | |
Index | 339 |