Overview

Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It highlights a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical and exorbitant that they ask us to fundamentally rethink literary and intellectual history, especially in relation to Enlightenment and Romanticism. The volume presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story about a set of exorbitant and radical figures and institutions including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most radical, notorious, and exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. Over eight, comparative chapters, the book presents a range of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. The relation between Blake and Hamann is particularly illuminating, and this volume presents the first expanded comparative reading of these two highly important and idiosyncratic figures. It pays particular attention to the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann's distinctive conception of language, showing that this is where they articulate a radical critique of instrumental thought, institutional religion, and argue for an irreducible relation between language and the sexual body, and these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.

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9780191871429

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Alexander Regier, Associate Professor, Rice University Alexander Regier is Associate Professor of English at Rice University and editor of the scholarly journal Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. He is author of Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-editor of Wordsworth's Poetic Theory (Palgrave, 2010) and has edited special journal issues on 'Mobilities' and 'Genealogies'. Dr Regier has published widely on Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, ruins, contemporary poetry, the aesthetics of sport and other topics; his work has been supported by a number of awards, including an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

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