William Galperin

The History of Missed Opportunities

British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

William H. Galperin is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of The Historical Austen (2003).

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. Mai 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 467g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600195
• ISBN-10: 150360019X
• Artikelnr.: 47299375

Autorenporträt

William H. Galperin is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of The Historical Austen (2003).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Prelude: The Panorama and the Everyday
chapter abstract
In the large circular paintings that Robert Barker exhibited in his
Panorama in Leicester Square, notably his painting of London (1795),
viewers encountered a distended present in which the everyday, a stratum of
experience that, as Maurice Blanchot notes, is "never see[n] a first time
but is only see[n] again," comes eventually to view. The "panoramic"
experience registers a period-bound phenomenology in which the everyday
becomes visible and thinkable for essentially the first time.
Introduction
chapter abstract
The emergence of the everyday in the romantic period involved a mode of
recovery that pitted an empirical history-where the past remains a guide to
what is probable and likely to reoccur-and a history in which the prior is
sufficiently singular that its reproducibility in any form apart from what
"every day life" is undermined. This latter history is evident in
Wordsworth's demonstration of what subjective or "poetic" experience
routinely forgets or misses. It is at work in Austen's revisions that
return her to a world appreciable solely in retrospect. In Byron it is
allied with the "history" to which marriage and everyday domesticity are
consigned before marriage, or by a nostalgia that, lacking mnemonic
support, is radically anonymous and conceptual. From domestic fiction to
the fragment poem, including Byron's Don Juan, romantic-period literary
production is marked by genres answerable to the everyday.
1The Everyday, History, and Possibility
chapter abstract
Although the "everyday" has long been synonymous with malaise, anomie, and
routine, the conditions surrounding its emergence in the romantic period,
where it names a possible world that has been missed or overlooked, are
recapitulated and extended in twentieth century thought. In the conceptual
moves undertaken by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and by Henri
Lefebvre in his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, the everyday is
dependent, practically as well as dialectically, on an entrenched
orientation typically associated with idealism, or with romanticism in its
"standard" formation, that "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger) both predates
and supersedes. A similar conception of the everyday obtains in the
writings of political theorist Jane Bennett, whose sense of an enchanted
materialism echoes both Lefebvre and philosopher Stanley Cavell in
stressing the "extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday"
and the larger assemblage to which we all belong.
2Wordsworth's Double Take
chapter abstract
It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth's
poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it
misses-or that often evanesce in his writing-are recoverable and acutely
palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of
missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is
typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the
particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical
distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look,
"things of every day" emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized
in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the
daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet's sister), which lacks
historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and
nowhere.
3Histories of the Present and the Historicity of the Present: Mansfield
Park, Emma, Jane Austen's Letters
chapter abstract
In the approximately fifteen years during which her first three novels were
revisited and revised, Jane Austen achieved an appreciative perspective on
her milieu that would have been impossible had that interval been less
protracted and less consequential. By process of revision and reflection, a
world and milieu that had been written out of history was provisionally
restored in a practice inimitably Austenian. This restoration is especially
evident in the two novels composed just after the period of
revision-Mansfield Park and Emma-whose worlds remained both an
unprecedented representation of "real life" to contemporary readers and a
resuscitation of a present lost to time. Similarly, the letters that Austen
wrote her sister over the course of her life make clear that the "real
natural every day" world that she brought vividly to the published page was
the only "prospect" when there was increasingly no future for her.
4Lord and Lady Byron
chapter abstract
An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron's short unhappy marriage to Annabella
Milbanke remains the "singular," everyday world of relation that marriage
represented for him, both beforehand, when marriage was an abstraction
performed in correspondence with Milbanke, and afterwards, when the Byron
marriage and the world it figured was literally a history of missed
opportunities that the poet recaptured and reinscribed in Don Juan. The
finite, epistolary conversation that constituted the Byron courtship was
more than a trial run at marriage, particularly as the opposite of what
Byron disparagingly called "love." It proved a stay against a future that,
on the relational front and in Byron's contemporaneous Eastern Tales, was
devoid of either hope or possibility. Here, in the sway of anticipatory
nostalgia, marriage day after day would be suddenly fathomable and as
valuable as the monetary fortune Byron also sought, but as a history of
missed opportunities.
5Don Juan and the Romantic Fragment
chapter abstract
Along with the repetition of days that it mimes as an endless conversation,
Don Juan is additionally representative in the way a missed opportunity
(the Byron marriage) is recognized and honored by the poem's form. The
ever-unfolding poem amounts to a history that takes the form not of
retrospection but of what might have been. Don Juan registers the gain, the
"willingness for the everyday," that marriage produces in practice, and in
this case poetic practice, and "in the repetition of days" (Cavell) to
which his poem conforms. As a relational do-over, whose ending,
accordingly, was a parting unto death, the poem connects to fragment
poems-a quintessentially romantic genre-by Coleridge and Shelley and to the
tendency in Keats's Odes to foreground a present that goes undocumented or
is closed off by form.