Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism

by Andrew M. Stauffer

• ISBN13: 9780521846752
• ISBN10: 0521846757
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as English men and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine and the law and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, Stauffer charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self. In their poetry and prose, Romantic authors including Blake, Coleridge, Godwin, Shelley and Byron negotiate the meanings of indignation and rage amidst a clamourous debate over the place of anger in art and in civil society. This innovative book has much to contribute to the understanding of Romantic literature and the cultural history of the emotions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
List of abbreviations	x
Introduction: fits of rage	1	(15)
Towards Romantic anger	16	(22)
Burke, Coleridge, and the rage for indignation	38	(26)
Inflammatory reactions	64	(23)
Provocation and the plot of anger	87	(23)
Shelley and the masks of anger	110	(23)
Byron's curse	133	(31)
Epilogue	164	(11)
Notes	175	(25)
Bibliography	200	(15)
Index	215