Paul Hamilton – författare

TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.

Realpoetik compares the writings of key German, French, and Italian Romantics, with an eye to their differences from British Romanticism. The principle of selection is to choose writers whose use of fiction is realistic -- not realist, but fundamentally contributory to the purposes of non-fictional discourse. The political resonance audible when we put Real at the start of a compound noun is also true to the period looked at. At that time, positive political institutions were recovering from their upending in the French Revolution and their strategic re-shaping in the period of Restoration after Napoleon. In this volume, Paul Hamilton pinpoints a moment when the political imagination was actually creative of political reality. It is a long gloss on Friedrich Meinecke's description of the early Romantic period in Germany as 'that past era of teeming intellectual impulses with its excess of non-political political ideals', but Hamilton finds his insight into the contemporary inextricability of the ideal and the political true of France and Italy. Before the existence of a unified Germany or Italy, and in the new France after Napoleon, there was an opportunity and a necessity to imagine the kind of nation which would be desirable. Realpoetik examines the extent to which this illuminates the fiction and philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, Madame de Staël, Giacomo Leopardi and others. It also reflects on current dissatisfaction with existing political arrangements and our contemporary desire to re-imagine a new, more representative politics.

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism focuses on the period beginning with the French Revolution and extending to the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. It brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The volume begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish amongst others. Then follows a second section based on the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, encapsulated by the different discourses with which writers of the time, set up an internal comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of understanding, and the Enlightenment encyclopaedic project. Discourses typically push their individual claims to resume European culture, collaborating and trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featuring here are history, geography, drama, theology, language, geography, philosophy, political theory, the sciences, and the media. Each chapter offers original and individual interpretation of individual aspects of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.

Paul Hamilton here redefines romanticism in terms of its philosophical habits of self-consciousness. According to Hamilton, metaromanticism, or the ways in which writers of the romantic period generalized their own practices, was fundamentally characteristic of the romantic project itself. Through bracing analyses of the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and key works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen, Hamilton shows how the romantic movement's struggle with its own tenets was not an effort to seek an alternative way of thought, but instead a way of becoming what it already was. And yet, as Hamilton reveals, the romanticists were still not content with their own self-consciousness. Pushed to the limits, such contemplation either manifested itself as self-disgust or forced romanticists to search for a discourse outside of aesthetics. Adding greater clarity to our understanding of romanticism and shedding much-needed light on the commerce between English writers and philosophers in Germany and France, this study should be valuable to students of literature, aesthetics and critical theory.

Paul Hamilton here redefines romanticism in terms of its philosophical habits of self-consciousness. According to Hamilton, metaromanticism, or the ways in which writers of the romantic period generalized their own practices, was fundamentally characteristic of the romantic project itself. Through bracing analyses of the aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and key works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen, Hamilton shows how the romantic movement's struggle with its own tenets was not an effort to seek an alternative way of thought, but instead a way of becoming what it already was. And yet, as Hamilton reveals, the romanticists were still not content with their own self-consciousness. Pushed to the limits, such contemplation either manifested itself as self-disgust or forced romanticists to search for a discourse outside of aesthetics. Adding greater clarity to our understanding of romanticism and shedding much-needed light on the commerce between English writers and philosophers in Germany and France, this study should be valuable to students of literature, aesthetics and critical theory.

Historicism is the essential introduction to the field, providing its readers with the necessary knowledge, background and vocabulary to apply it in their own studies. Paul Hamilton's compact and comprehensive guide:* explains the theory and basics of historicism* presents a history of the term and its uses* introduces the reader to the key thinkers in the field, from ancient Greece to modern times* considers historicism in contemporary debates and its relevance to other modes of criticism, such as feminism and post-colonialism* contains an extensive bibliography of further reading.

Work on British Romanticism is often characterised as much by its conscious difference from preceding positions as it is by its approach to or choice of material. As a result, writing neglected or marginalised in one account will be restored to prominence in another, as we reconstruct the past as a history of the present. This collection of essays takes as its starting point the wide-ranging work of Marilyn Butler on Romantic literature, and includes contributions by some of the most prominent scholars of Romanticism working today. The essays offer interesting perspectives on Maria Edgeworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott and others, showing that the openness of modern critical perceptions matches and reflects the diversity of the literature and culture of the Romantic period itself.

Work on British Romanticism is often characterised as much by its conscious difference from preceding positions as it is by its approach to or choice of material. As a result, writing neglected or marginalised in one account will be restored to prominence in another, as we reconstruct the past as a history of the present. This collection of essays takes as its starting point the wide-ranging work of Marilyn Butler on Romantic literature, and includes contributions by some of the most prominent scholars of Romanticism working today. The essays offer interesting perspectives on Maria Edgeworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott and others, showing that the openness of modern critical perceptions matches and reflects the diversity of the literature and culture of the Romantic period itself.

This book is both a general introduction to and a particular interpretation of Shelley’s thought and major writings. As an introduction, it stresses his seriousness and sophistication, his poetic brilliance and intellectual courage. More specifically, its readings emphasise the materialistic and corporeal orientation of his work in opposition to a traditional view of him as a Romantic solipsist, a characterisation some of his own statements seem to invite. Fundamentally Shelley is understood here as a vanguard, revolutionary figure who writes for a better democratic future, but one which, paradoxically, he fears may threaten the cultural privilege it took to imagine it. But this pessimism is always the other side of an openness to new associations which continually reform both private and political life, relationship and citizenship.

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1885) published nothing in her lifetime, save short extracts from her journals and letters which her brother, William, included in his Guide to the Lakes. She spent most of her life caring for her brother and his family, working, traveling and studying with him and his friends who include de Quincey and Coleridge. This selection for the first time presents her writings as a discrete text, giving her a separate authorial voice from that of her brother and bringing her to a new generation of students, scholars and enthusiasts. Wordsworth's journals, analyzed and set into context by Paul Hamilton's insightful introduction, chronicle the hardships and indispositions, the comings and goings, the windfalls and losses of those around her, both at home and during her many travels, revealing a relish for the experiences of others distinctly free from Romantic egoism. Most significantly, in her Grasmere Journal, she tells her own story, imposing her own narrative structure on events and discovering the plot of her own life.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequently bridged the gap between British and European Romantic thought. This study sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations of comparable ambition. It argues that Coleridge found his philosophical adventures in the dominant idiom of his times exciting and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. Paul Hamilton situates major themes in Coleridge's prose and poetic writings in relation to his passion for German philosophy. He argues that Coleridge's infectious attachment to German (post-Kantian) philosophy was due to its symmetries with the structure of his Christian belief. Coleridge is read as an excited and winning expositor of this philosophy's power to articulate an absolute grounding of reality. Its comprehensiveness, however, rendered redundant further theological description, undermining the faith it had seemed to support.Thus arose Coleridge's anxious disguising of his German plagiarisms, aspersions cast on German originality, and his claims to have already experienced their insights within his own religious sensibility or in the writings of Anglican divines and neo-Platonists. This book recovers the extent to which his ideas call to be expanded within German philosophical debate.

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.