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The Familiar Essay, Romantic Affect and Metropolitan Culture

The Sweet Security of Streets

Simon Peter Hull (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

273 Seiten

2018 | Unabridged edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5275-0565-0 (ISBN)

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Through close readings of diverse examples by Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Irving and Poe, this book argues that the familiar essay in the Romantic period embodies a quintessentially metropolitan mode of affect. The generic traits of the essay—astuteness of observation, an ambulatory or paratactic movement of thought, and an urbane tone of wry or ironic humour—all predispose it to the expression of a detached, non-pathological state of mind. This is a mind conditioned by the quickened pace, assorted humanity, and plenitude of spectacle which characterise urban and urbanised life.In making a valuable, genre-based contribution to scholarship on the importance to Romantic studies of the city and metropolitan culture, the traditional concept of Romantic affect is reassessed. The book proposes a more complex and varied model than the simple binary one of a "feeling" reaction to Enlightenment "reason." Partly enacted within its own formal parameters and partly through its disruptive and genre-transcending progeny, the essayistic figure, the familiar essay articulates a blithe and, at times, shocking and provocative discourse of "un-affect," or a strategically and often satirical callousness. Therefore, the overall concept of affect in this period needs to be understood not as a unified entity opposed to Enlightenment reason, but a dialogue between concurrent, opposing modes, played out against a dichotomized geo-cultural landscape of the country and the city. Essayistic un-affect emerges, in the end, as an apolitical phenomenon, a primary vehicle for the essayist's inherent scepticism, sometimes enabling outright ridicule and, at other times, a tentative questioning or probing of both orthodox thought and emerging ideas: from the rarefied liberalist sensibility of the Lake poets, to the hubristic vanity of the colonial adventurer, and from the allure of hedonistic, Old World decadence to the proscriptive strictures of moralistic art.

Simon Peter Hull received an MA in Romanticism and a PhD on Charles Lamb from the University of Bristol, UK, before finding his way to Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2008. He worked there for three years as an Assistant Professor of English, teaching first-year courses in literature, and rhetoric and effective writing, before spending four years, from 2012 to 2016, at Universiti Sains Malaysia, in Penang, as a Senior Lecturer, broadening his research interests from British Romanticism and metropolitan culture to South-East Asian colonial writing. Over the past ten years, his research in both these areas has regularly appeared in the form of articles for international journals such as Studies in Travel Writing and Essays in Romanticism, as well as book chapters for publishers including Humanities e-books and Routledge. He is also the author of Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine (2010).

Erscheinungsdatum	09.02.2018
Verlagsort	Newcastle upon Tyne
Sprache	englisch
Maße	148 x 212 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5275-0565-0 / 1527505650
ISBN-13	978-1-5275-0565-0 / 9781527505650
Zustand	Neuware