Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-62
Author(s):  
Arden Hegele
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Medical Advances ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter charts developments in anatomy in the wake of the French Revolution, and shows how Romantic lyrics model a reading practice informed by anatomical medicine. Surgical tropes from the advances in morbid anatomy, for example, inform William Wordsworth’s most important poems. Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s mind” and the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth’s model of interpretation, the critic Francis Jeffrey and the poet John Keats developed a practice of dissective reading, an influential protocol that crossed between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. Dissective reading anticipates symptomatic close reading through a segmentation of surface and underlying structures, and invokes dismemberment as a tool for converting critical reading into authorial auto-exegesis. Examples drawn from Wordsworth and Keats reveal how Romantic lyrics offer up the poet’s own body as the subject of surgical (and critical) analysis, treating critical readings as diagnoses of the poets themselves.

scholarly journals Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Guillotine, and Modern Ontological Anxiety

Text Matters ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Lacefield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley’s novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself—the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield’s interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel’s exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein’s Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical “slice” within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley’s themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences.

A Constituição de 1822 uma Filosofia Política Intempestiva

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Viriato Soromenho-Marques ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Restoration Age ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The French Revolution

In this paper the philosophical foundations of the first Portuguese Constitution are submitted to critical analysis. Drafted in the aftermath of the 1820 Revolution, the Constitution of 1822 is deeply determined by contradictory tensions and forces. We may see in it the trace of the freedom trends developed in the Enlightenment period and led to practical terms in the dramatic battleground of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the Portuguese Constitution of 1822 reflect also the energetic resistance from the conservative sectors and values of the Portuguese society and also the coming influence of the Restoration Age political philosophy, aimed to fight the rationalistic paradigm of natural right constitutional theories.

The Conference of Pillnitz

1897 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 133-138
Author(s):  
Oscar Browning
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

The conference of Pillnitz, although it occupies an important place in all histories of the French Revolution, is still the subject of much misconception amongst historians. Immediately after it was held, a person so well informed as Mr. Burges, the English Under-Secretaryfor Foreign Affairs, believed that it resulted in a kind of treaty between Austria and Prussia for the dismemberment of France, and it was long regarded as the beginning of the first Coalition.

scholarly journals Martin Luther and Modernity, Capitalism, and Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Zachhuber
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

The concept of modernity has emerged as a major philosophical, theological, and sociological category of interpretation in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was meant to embrace fundamental changes to the fabric of Western culture, including the rise of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, and secularity. From its inception, references to Luther and the Reformation have been a frequent element of this kind of theory. The first major theorist of modernity in this sense was arguably Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, who set the tone of subsequent contributions by aligning modernity with subjectivity. For him, the religious dimension of this development was crucial, and he was explicit in his claim that it was the Reformation that brought the turn to subjectivity in the realm of religion. A side effect of the turn to subjectivity was the alienation of the subject from the world. Modernity is thus deeply ambivalent, and so is Protestantism. Later thinkers developed these insights further, but also criticized the identification of Luther with the origin of modernity, pointing to continuities between his theology and earlier, medieval thought.

Dr. Joseph Priestley, John Wilkinson and the French Revolution, 1789–1802

1958 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Chaloner
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

LIKE Jacobitism and Chartism, the study of the influence of the French Revolution on British politics and public opinion has attracted a good deal of sentimental interest, but it is a curious fact that with the exception of Professor Alfred Cobban's anthology (The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (1950)), A. H. Lincoln's Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (1938), and a few scattered articles comparatively little appears to have been published since 1926 on the subject. It has therefore never been examined in the light of those trends in historiography associated with the names of Unwin and Namier.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution

The introductory chapter opens up the question of how to approach the aftermath of the Terror. Most of revolutionary historiography is focused on the origins of the event, not on its aftermath. This chapter argues that there is much to learn about the French Revolution and its relevance to our own times by studying the aftermath of the Terror. In articulating the book’s approach to the subject, the chapter draws on the recent literature on transitional justice and trauma, as well as on the much earlier ideas of Edgar Quinet. Approaching the aftermath of the Terror invites us to consider how those who had experienced revolutionary violence faced the past in the context of a movement oriented toward the future.

6. Where it stands

2019 ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The historian François Furet proclaimed in 1978, at the start of a much celebrated essay, that ‘The French Revolution is finished’. He meant the Revolution ought to be the subject for detached historical enquiry. ‘Where it stands’ examines what ended the French Revolution, the legacy it left behind, and various interpretations of its legacy, both within France and worldwide. The history of the Revolution, in France at least, has been more a matter of commemoration than scholarly analysis. The bicentenary in 1989 released a torrent of vituperative publishing, most of it denouncing one aspect or another of the Revolution and its legacy.

Writer-Physicians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Jones
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Didactic Poetry ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Rush

The study of literature and medicine in the Romantic period is an established and expanding field. However, scholars have tended to focus on a few canonical writers and a small number of texts, thereby obscuring the age’s huge diversity of medical writing. This chapter takes a wider view, presenting five case studies of medically trained or medically connected writers who demonstrate the broad intersection between medical and literary culture: John Aikin, Benjamin Rush, Joanna Baillie (sister of the physician Matthew Baillie), Erasmus Darwin, and John Keats. The chapter uses these case studies to show what is distinctive or innovative about interactions between literature and medicine in the period. The case studies also represent different genres of medical literature, or different genres that became in some sense medicalized: biography, autobiography, drama, didactic poetry, and epic. Each case study includes some consideration of the reception history of the genre in question.

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