Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy

Simon Swift is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at the School of English, University of Leeds.

'This book offers a sizeable challenge to received ideas about the relationship between Kant's critical philosophy and those various anthropological concerns that were hitherto thought marginal...to his main philosophical project. He provides some exceptionally acute commentary not only on the tensions in Kant's project but also on the way that they have repeatedly emerged throughout its reception-history to date.  There is much illuminating commentary on the emergence of themes in the writings of Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft... Swift's book offers a strong corrective to interpretations of which take her to have subjugated feminist values and priorities to male conceptions of "enlightened" reason. Swift has clearly learned a good deal from recent developments in literary theory (New Historicist as well as deconstructionist and feminist approached) but deploys them with a keen philosophical intelligence and a well-developed sense of their various shortcomings when applied without sufficiently detailed analysis of the concepts and categories involved.   Altogether this book carves out a distinctive and important place in the border-zone between philosophy, literary theory, and cultural history.'

• Introduction; Part I: Foregrounding Philosophical Anthropology; 1 Stating the Case: Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft; 2 Reflective Judgement as Symbolic Cognition; Part II: Reason in Theory; 3 Kant, Herder, Gayatri Spivak and the Question of Philosophical Anthropology. 4 Paul de Man and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism; 5 Mary Wollstonecraft and the 'Reserve of Reason'; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.