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

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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.

Reviews

'This book offers a sizeable challenge to received ideas about the relationship between Kant's critical philosophy and those various anthropological concerns that were hitherto thought marginal...to his main philosophical project. He providessome exceptionally acute commentary not only on the tensions in Kant's project but also on the way that they have repeatedly emerged throughout its reception-history to date. There is much illuminating commentary on the emergence of themes in the writings of Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft... Swift's book offers a strong corrective to interpretations of which take her to have subjugated feminist values and priorities to male conceptions of "enlightened" reason. Swift has clearly learned a good deal from recent developments in literary theory (New Historicist as well as deconstructionist and feminist approached) but deploys them with a keen philosophical intelligence and a well-developed sense of their various shortcomings when applied without sufficiently detailed analysis of the concepts and categories involved. Altogether this book carves out a distinctive and important place in the border-zone between philosophy, literary theory, and cultural history.' -- Professor Christopher Norris, Cardiff University
"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

Author Bio

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)