Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/books/5h73px91t

Abstract

This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Forest Pyle, essays by Ian Balfour, David Ferris, Karen Swann, with a response by Marc Redfield.

In spite of the recent prevalence of historical and sociological concerns in Romantic scholarship, the aesthetic insists: indeed, its very mode is one of insistence. The essays by Balfour, Ferris, and Swann collected for this issue address the question of "Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic" by turning in various forms of Romantic versions of the relationship between the aesthetic and power, whether as a form of violence or a force of possibility. In readings that address Kant (Balfour, Ferris) and Shelley (Balfour, Swann, Pyle) and that include discussions of Keats, Wordsworth, and Schiller, these essaysx demonstrate that to read is not to take refuge from but to subject onself to the adventures of power and force that are inextricable from the aesthetic. Redfield's response to these essays stresses their emphasis on the predicament of reading--the ways in which they "exemplify the diverse legacy of deconstruction"--and argues for the importance of their intervention in Romantic Studies.

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