Peter Melville

Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

What does hospitality have to do with Romanticism? What are the conditions of a Romantic welcome? Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation traces the curious passage of strangers through representative texts of English Romanticism, while also considering some European philosophical "pre-texts" of this tradition. From Rousseau's invocation of the cot-less Carib to Coleridge's reception of his Porlockian caller, Romanticisms encounters with the "strange" remind us that the hospitable relation between subject and Other is invariably fraught with problems. Drawing on recent theories of accommodation and estrangement, Peter Melville argues that the texts of Romantic hospitality (including those of Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley) are often troubled by the subject's failure to welcome the Other without also exposing the stranger to some form of hostility or violence. Far from convincing Romantic writers to abandon the figure of hospitality, this failure invites them instead to articulate and theorize a paradoxical imperative governing the subject's encounters with strangers: if the obligation to welcome the Other is ultimately impossible to fulfill, then it is also impossible to ignore. This paradox is precisely what makes Romantic hospitality an act of responsibility. Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation brings together the wide-ranging interests of hospitality theory, diet studies, and literary ethics within a single investigation of visitation and accommodation in the Romantic period. As re-visionary as it is interdisciplinary, the book demonstrates not only the extent to which we continue to be influenced by Romantic views of the stranger but also, more importantly, what Romanticism has to teach us about our own hospitable obligations within this heritage.

---

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. März 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 155mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 431g
• ISBN-13: 9780889205178
• ISBN-10: 0889205175
• Artikelnr.: 26347070

Autorenporträt

Peter Melville is an assistant professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, and secretary-treasurer for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. His research explores scenes of accommodation and estrangement in Romantic literature. His recent publications include articles in European Romantic Review, Mosaic, and The Dalhousie Review and a chapter in Timothy Morton's Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism.

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents for
Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation by Peter Melville
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading the Foreign: Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance
to Accommodation
Of Mice and Women: A Preliminary Case Study for a Theory of Romantic
Hospitality
Reading the Romantic Foreign
The Impossibility of Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation
Chapter One: Unsettling Rousseau: Hospitality in Emile and Discourse on
Inequality
Hostile Hermit, Inhospitable Levite
Belated Welcomes: Hospitality in Emile
"L'hospitalité de Calypso"
The Sleepy Carib: Rousseau as Host
Chapter Two: The Rights of the Stranger: Kant's "Bond of Hospitality"
Eating, Tasting, Hosting: Toward a Philosophy of the Dinner Table
The Politics of Eating (with) Others
Staging the Nation: Hospitable Performances in the Anthropology
International Hospitality and the Conditioning of a Perpetual Peace
On the Foreigner in Perpetual Peace
Chapter Three: Coleridge and the Poetics of Hospitable Failure
A Mouse in the House
Coleridge and the Fort-Da Game of Hospitality
The Case of "Christabel"
The Fluttering "Stranger" and the Failure of the Hospitable Imagination
Two Too Many Sisters: Coleridge's Discursive Homelessness
Chapter Four: Hospitality without End: "Visitation" and Obligation in Mary
Shelley's The Last Man
The "Work" of Lionel's Narrative and the Death of the Reader
Animal Hospitality and the "Lure" of Language
Visiting the Sibyl
Plague as Metaphor and the History of Disease
"Visitations" of the Plague
Ryland's Pineapples, England's Hospital
Foreign Bodies / Foreign Infections (Conclusion)
Conclusion: Romantic Hospitality to Come
Guest as Allergen
Unspeakable Acts: Toward a Hospitality to Come
Works Cited
Index