Rhetoric of Romanticism

The late Paul de Man was Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University.

[The Rhetoric of Romanticism] shows us how the narrative of a 500-line poem can contain more cliff-hanging suspense, more sudden alternation of vision and concealment, than a thousand pages of commonplace romantic adventures. -- Northrop Frye, Times Literary Supplement DeMan's legacy is an intellectual style of remarkable purity...a style marked by didactic fervour, whose undertow takes us into strange seas of thought, but it remains analytic and prosaic, with a minimum of semiotic play, and no mixing by montage of fiction and criticism. London Review of Books

• Preface 1. Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image 2. The Image of Rousseau in the Poetry of Holderlin 3. Wordsworth and Holderlin 4. Autobiography As De-Facement 5. Wordsworth and the Victorians 6. Shelley Disfigured 7. Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats 8. Image and Emblem in Yeats 9. Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric 10. Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater Notes Bibliography for Essay 8 Notes on Permissions Index