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Palgrave Macmillan

Romanticism and the Contingent Self

The Challenge of Representation

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Authors:
  1. Michael Falk

    1. Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

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  • Offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature in which the self is fragile, degenerate or non-existent
  • Takes an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to the philosophy of self in Romantic literature
  • Uses digital humanities techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis

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About this book

This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Strange Multiplicities

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 1-41

  3. Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Contingent Selfhood

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 43-85

  4. Fiction: Growing Down in Edgeworth and Opie’s Novels

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 87-127

  5. Lyric: Self-Abnegation in the Sonnets of Clare and Smith

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 129-182

  6. Drama: Inner Seas in the Tragedies of Baillie and Harpur

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 183-228

  7. Prose: Moore’s Multiform Byron

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 229-265

  8. Conclusion

    • Michael Falk
    Pages 267-272

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 273-292
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Authors and Affiliations

  • Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Michael Falk

About the author

Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a literary scholar and programmer, whose work considers how computing can expand the study of literature, and how literature can expand the study of computing. His work appears in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Frontiers in AI and Robotics, the John Clare Society Journal, and elsewhere. Romanticism and the Contingent Self is his first book.

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