Disastrous Subjectivities : : Romaniticism, Modernity, and the Real / / David Collings.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter ACUP Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Collings, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

In sharply original readings of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Disastrous Subjectivities explores modernity’s failed promise to bring about a just social order under the ongoing threat of climate change. Drawing on Kantian critical philosophy and Lacanian theory, this book traverses aspects of the history of science, the form of the novel, the limits of historicism, and the impasses of moral autonomy. What passes for modernity takes shape not as truly modern or secular, but instead as a mode perpetually haunted by a traumatic sublime. The demand to realize justice within history turns out to require more than history can make possible, and more than the subject can bear.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Catastrophic Benevolence, Ruinous Immortality Wollstonecraft’s Shipwreck -- 2. Prohibiting the Impossible Godwin and the Formation of the Real -- 3. After the Covenant Undead Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Alpine Sublime -- 4. Trusting to the Billows Byron’s Poetics of the Real -- 5. Tarrying with Disaster Ethical Destitution in Shelley’s “ The Triumph of Life” -- Coda. Melting the Sublime Disastrous Objectivity in the Era of Climate Change -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index