Image Schemas in Romantic Poetry

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (Special Issue No. 1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Abbas Fadhil Lutfi ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Ester Vidović

The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cohen ◽  
Carole Beal
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.


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