March 2016
288 pages.
$60.00
Cloth ISBN: 9780804796958
Digital ISBN: 9780804798761
(20% off e-book after you add to Shopping Cart.
Rental options also available.)
This book revisits British Romanticism as a poetics of heightened attention. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as Britain was on the alert for a possible French invasion, attention became a phenomenon of widespread interest, one that aligned and distinguished an unusual range of fields (including medicine, aesthetics, theology, ethics, pedagogy, and politics). Within this wartime context, the Romantic aesthetic tradition appears as a response to a crisis in attention caused by demands on both soldiers and civilians to keep watch. Close formal readings of the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, (Charlotte) Smith, and Wordsworth, in conversation with research into Enlightenment philosophy and political and military discourses, suggest the variety of forces competing for—or commanding—attention in the period. This new framework for interpreting Romanticism and its legacy illuminates what turns out to be an ongoing tradition of war literature that, rather than give testimony to or represent warfare, uses rhythm and verse to experiment with how and what we attend to during times of war.
About the author
Lily Gurton-Wachter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.
"Smart, well-researched, and provocatively argued, this book powerfully demonstrates how the seemingly least political demands of poets (to pay attention) turn out to be deeply enmeshed in political discourse of the time."
—Brian McGrath, Clemson University
"A compelling exploration of the interplay between a poetics of heightened attention and the political debates and technological innovations associated with vigilance and alarm, this book will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu."
—Nancy Yousef, City University of New York