Overview

Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the ""nothingness of personality,"" as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

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9781623561116

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Reviews

This book is full of deep paradoxes that radically refresh our perception of both Mikhail Bakhtin's theories and Romantic aesthetics in their mutual refractions. Bakhtinian approach to English Romanticism allows us to penetrate more deeply into the latter's personalistic and dialogical tenets. Furthermore, Walter Reed prompts us to see Mikhail Bakhtin himself as a disguised Romantic of the third generation whose critique is addressed primarily to traditional adversaries of Romanticism (such as Rationalists and Neoclassicists), but also to the Romantics of the first (early 19 c.) and second (decadents and symbolists of the turn of the 20 c.) generations. Bakhtin's critique of Romanticism is internal critique: of the less radical otherness from the standpoint of the more radical otherness. This book is a must read for all lovers of Romantic poetry and aesthetics. -- Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature, Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory, Director of the Center for Humanities Innovation, Durham University, UK Readers will come away from this book with a better grasp of Bakhtin's ideas and a pocketful of new perceptions about well-known Romantic poems. More than that, by putting Bakhtin into fruitful dialogue with it, Walter Reed has lit up the whole terrain of English and German Romanticism, not to mention literary theory. And beyond even that, his welcome departure from the prevailing hermeneutic of suspicion, his generous and assimilative stance, his poetics of trust, confirms what many of us still believe: that Romanticism was not just an ideological or aesthetic delusion but a worldview full of durable insights. -- Michael K. Ferber, Professor of English, University of New Hampshire, USA Distracted by carnival and forever allowed a second chance by dialogue, it is easy to forget that those concepts were preceded by an ethical architectonics. Bakhtin's cosmos is founded on the notion that dialogic knowledge is dependent on interactive personalism, Creator-creature relations, and the virtues of trust. In his new book, Walter Reed develops these early Bakhtinian ideas into nothing less than an architectonics of Romanticism: muscular, full of particulars, in which Bakhtin's passion for the fragment is harnessed to a case for Otherness and literary genre becomes the universal binder for creativity. In the early 1920s, while his colleagues in Leningrad were talking Marxism, Bakhtin was holding seminars on his life-long hero, Friedrich Schelling. Reed suggests illuminating reasons why this was so. Both Bakhtin and Romanticism gain in potency and relevance. -- Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA

Author Information

Walter L. Reed is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. University Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, USA. Professor Reed has taught literature at Yale, the University of Texas, Austin, and Emory University. His publications include Dialogues of the Word (1993), An Exemplary History of the Novel (1981) Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1974).

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