Romantic Potency : : The Paradox of Desire / / Laura Claridge.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Claridge, Laura,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

In this spirited and eloquent book, Laura Claridge maintains that the extraordinary power of the male Romantic imagination stems in large part from the paradox that Romantic poets grounded their desire in the vicissitudes of language, a medium guaranteed to thwart their yearnings. Focusing on both canonical and less familiar poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, Claridge draws on Lacanian theory to explore Romantic desire in relationship to the infant's radical yearning for an Eden before the advent of language. The Romantics, she asserts, attempt the impossible: to transcend the medium of words and reattain that original paradise of silence, but with their poetic voices intact.Claridge perceives textual desire as a discursive strategy for staving off consummation and death. She suggests the ways in which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron made use of the philosophically marginalized position of women to support their attempt to locate an "essential" subjectivity. In spite of the highly personal linguistic models that each poet developed, Claridge finds a pervasive similarity of psychological contours: in every case, the poet writes of a freedom outside of language, even as he insists on the enduring need to write yet again.Romantic Potency will be challenging reading for literary theorists, scholars and students of English Romanticism and of eighteenth-century literature, and others interested in psychoanalytic approaches to literature.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. Wordsworth: Flirtations -- 1. Woman and the Threat of Consummation -- 2. Transgression or Transcendence: Voicing Desire through Silence -- 3. Safe Sex: The Collapse of Gender into Re-generation(s) -- PART II. Shelley: The Frustrated Intereourse of Poetic Ecstasy -- 4. The Familial Subtext of Desire -- 5. Language, Freedom, and the Female -- 6. Death and Artistic Authenticity -- PART III. Byron: Art of the Perpetual Tease -- 7. Underwriting Death, Overwriting a Theme -- 8. Patriarchal Dramas and Social Reproduction -- 9. Paradox Celebrated -- Works Consulted -- Index