Arbitrary Power : Romanticism, Language, Politics / William Keach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keach, William, author.

Series:

Literature in history (Princeton, N.J.)

Literature in History

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Power (Social sciences) in literature.

English language--19th century--Rhetoric.

English language.

English language--Political aspects--Great Britain.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Politics and literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. Arbitrary Power

2. Words Are Things

3. The Politics of Rhyme

4. Vulgar Idioms

5. " 'A Subtler Language within Language' "

6. The Language of Revolutionary Violence

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9781400873241

140087324X

OCLC:

933516590