Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

Romantic Potency : The Paradox of Desire / Laura Claridge.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©1992Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9781501733727
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 821/.709145 20/eng/20230216
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. Wordsworth: Flirtations -- 1. Woman and the Threat of Consummation -- 2. Transgression or Transcendence: Voicing Desire through Silence -- 3. Safe Sex: The Collapse of Gender into Re-generation(s) -- PART II. Shelley: The Frustrated Intereourse of Poetic Ecstasy -- 4. The Familial Subtext of Desire -- 5. Language, Freedom, and the Female -- 6. Death and Artistic Authenticity -- PART III. Byron: Art of the Perpetual Tease -- 7. Underwriting Death, Overwriting a Theme -- 8. Patriarchal Dramas and Social Reproduction -- 9. Paradox Celebrated -- Works Consulted -- Index
Summary: In this spirited and eloquent book, Laura Claridge maintains that the extraordinary power of the male Romantic imagination stems in large part from the paradox that Romantic poets grounded their desire in the vicissitudes of language, a medium guaranteed to thwart their yearnings. Focusing on both canonical and less familiar poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, Claridge draws on Lacanian theory to explore Romantic desire in relationship to the infant's radical yearning for an Eden before the advent of language. The Romantics, she asserts, attempt the impossible: to transcend the medium of words and reattain that original paradise of silence, but with their poetic voices intact.Claridge perceives textual desire as a discursive strategy for staving off consummation and death. She suggests the ways in which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron made use of the philosophically marginalized position of women to support their attempt to locate an "essential" subjectivity. In spite of the highly personal linguistic models that each poet developed, Claridge finds a pervasive similarity of psychological contours: in every case, the poet writes of a freedom outside of language, even as he insists on the enduring need to write yet again.Romantic Potency will be challenging reading for literary theorists, scholars and students of English Romanticism and of eighteenth-century literature, and others interested in psychoanalytic approaches to literature.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781501733727

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. Wordsworth: Flirtations -- 1. Woman and the Threat of Consummation -- 2. Transgression or Transcendence: Voicing Desire through Silence -- 3. Safe Sex: The Collapse of Gender into Re-generation(s) -- PART II. Shelley: The Frustrated Intereourse of Poetic Ecstasy -- 4. The Familial Subtext of Desire -- 5. Language, Freedom, and the Female -- 6. Death and Artistic Authenticity -- PART III. Byron: Art of the Perpetual Tease -- 7. Underwriting Death, Overwriting a Theme -- 8. Patriarchal Dramas and Social Reproduction -- 9. Paradox Celebrated -- Works Consulted -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In this spirited and eloquent book, Laura Claridge maintains that the extraordinary power of the male Romantic imagination stems in large part from the paradox that Romantic poets grounded their desire in the vicissitudes of language, a medium guaranteed to thwart their yearnings. Focusing on both canonical and less familiar poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, Claridge draws on Lacanian theory to explore Romantic desire in relationship to the infant's radical yearning for an Eden before the advent of language. The Romantics, she asserts, attempt the impossible: to transcend the medium of words and reattain that original paradise of silence, but with their poetic voices intact.Claridge perceives textual desire as a discursive strategy for staving off consummation and death. She suggests the ways in which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron made use of the philosophically marginalized position of women to support their attempt to locate an "essential" subjectivity. In spite of the highly personal linguistic models that each poet developed, Claridge finds a pervasive similarity of psychological contours: in every case, the poet writes of a freedom outside of language, even as he insists on the enduring need to write yet again.Romantic Potency will be challenging reading for literary theorists, scholars and students of English Romanticism and of eighteenth-century literature, and others interested in psychoanalytic approaches to literature.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Apr 2024)