Uttara Natarajan – författare

The `only pretension, of which I am tenacious,' declares William Hazlitt in The Plain Speaker, `is that of being a metaphysician'; yet up till now his metaphysics, and particularly what is here identified as his `power principle', have not been examined in detail. This book identifies the metaphysical Hazlitt within the other and better-known Hazlitt, long acknowledged as a master of `the familiar style' and more recently celebrated for the fierceness and intensity of his political prose. Studying his development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, it examines the revelation of power in his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure, his theory of genius, and his moral theory, and asserts the tenacity of this principle throughout his work. Disseminated through the range of his writings, Hazlitt's metaphysics becomes a metaphysics of power in more senses than one: it is both argument and example, itself manifesting that force of human intellect that it seeks to explicate.

This book discusses the importance of the Romantic essay to the development of realism in the Victorian era. It explores how specific texts by key Victorian authors—Dickens, Ruskin, Eliot, Pater, Hardy, and Stevenson—depart from the principles and practice of their forebears in prose: William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. Reviving, in its methodology, a now nearly obsolete critical mode, the source study, it tracks in the transition from essayists of the Romantic era to their Victorian successors, a changing relation between 'ideal' and 'real', or 'self' and 'other'. Naming as 'realism', an English literary practice of the nineteenth century that, mimetic in its expression, remains committed to the absolute and uncompromised reality of the other, it argues for the importance of the Romantic essay to the genesis and evolution of this practice. The familiar or conversational essay is key to its argument, but the book draws widely, too, on pertinent material in other essay forms: the critical essay, the character sketch and its near relation, the biographical portrait. The literary history that it narrates discloses the extent of William Hazlitt's intellectual legacy to later writers. The progression from Romantic to post-Romantic thought is marked by the gradual demise of the Romantic imagination. From that demise arises a new and peculiarly Victorian persuasion of other grounds—or the absence—of moral possibility.

The rediscovery and restitution of William Hazlitt as a canonical Romantic author has been among the latest and most significant developments in present-day Romantic studies. This volume, a collection of previously unpublished essays by the foremost scholars in the field presents Hazlitt as a philosophical, and not simply a 'familiar' essayist. It offers a comprehensive statement of the significance and transmission of Hazlitt's philosophical principles, in his own work and in that of his contemporaries and succeeding writers. This book is an essential contribution to a vital new aspect of Romantic studies and shows Hazlitt to be, as his memorial claims, 'The first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age'.

This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

The rediscovery and restitution of William Hazlitt as a canonical Romantic author has been among the latest and most significant developments in present-day Romantic studies. This volume, a collection of previously unpublished essays by the foremost scholars in the field presents Hazlitt as a philosophical, and not simply a 'familiar' essayist. It offers a comprehensive statement of the significance and transmission of Hazlitt's philosophical principles, in his own work and in that of his contemporaries and succeeding writers. This book is an essential contribution to a vital new aspect of Romantic studies and shows Hazlitt to be, as his memorial claims, 'The first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age'.