Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory

Description

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy proposes a radical re-visioning of Romantic literature by developing a new insight into its philosophical importance. It challenges both a number of recent attacks on philosophical reason, and new historicist readings of Romanticism, by arguing that they fundamentally misinterpret what reason is in strikingly similar ways. Engaging with the philosophical, political and literary writings of Rousseau, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft, and with the deconstruction of Paul de Man and Gayatri Spivak, it suggests that postmodernism's recent assault on Enlightenment universalism, and on aesthetic autonomy, in the name of particularity and heterogeneity underestimates the capacity of reason to orient itself towards forms of anthropological and literary difference.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Kant, Romanticism and the Ethics of Thinking
Part I: Foregrounding Philosophical Anthropology
1 Stating the Case: Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft
2 Reflective Judgement as Symbolic Cognition
Part II: Reason in Theory
3 Kant, Herder, Gayatri Spivak and the Question of Philosophical Anthropology
4 Paul de Man and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
5 Mary Wollstonecraft and the 'Reserve of Reason' Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author(s)

Simon Swift, Simon Swift is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK.  He is the author of Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2008)

Reviews

"Swift's remarkable Romanticism, Literature, and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, and Contemporary Theory stands out as a highly theoretical study in at least two respects: its engagement with figures who defined theory before the advent of the New Historicism (Paul DeMan and Gayatri Spivak), and its forceful re-reading of texts by Kant and Rousseau that fostered deconstruction…Swift's study is a major intervention in what might be described either as post-deconstructive philosophical criticism or theoretically advanced intellectual history." —Margaret Russett, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 47, No. 4

Margaret Russett,