Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

Peer, L.

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2010-01-13

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9780230617384

DOI: 10.1057/9780230101920

Dimensions: 216cm x140cm

Pages: 223