Restructures and revitalises late Romantic literature as a movement
fascinated with competing claims about the reality and knowability of
character
The idea of character that many of us still take for granted - whether
considered in print as an object of representation, or in life as a
congenital 'bias' or an acquirable moral possession - is the shared
concern of a multidisciplinary debate in reform-era Britain. This book
argues for the independent merits of several lesser-known works written
in England and Scotland during the 1820s and 1830s, recovering in these
works a sustained ideological engagement with the ever-slippery concept
of character. The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism studies
texts written by contemporary poets, novelists, essayists, journalists,
philosophers, phrenologists, sociologists, gossip-mongers and anonymous
correspondents. Its main authors of interest include David Hume, Walter
Scott, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Letitia Landon,
Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
With a fresh, interdisciplinary approach, this original intervention in
Romantic-era scholarship throws character into relief as an especially
problematic concept, not only for the poststructuralist critics who
study late Romantic writers, but also for the writers themselves. It
changes the ways in which literary scholarship has thought about the
development of character discourse in the first half of the nineteenth
century.
Key Features
- Describes a synthesis by which debates in many disciplines
(novel-writing, periodical-writing, philosophy, phrenology, sociology,
medicine, ethics) are distilled into the concept of character
associated with literary realism
- Moves a relatively eclectic group of writers to the forefront of a
literary culture traditionally narrowed to focus on Lord Byron, Percy
Shelley, John Keats and their legacies
- Establishes a more comprehensive understanding of late Romantic
literary networks by pairing authors rarely studied together (such as
William Hazlitt and Letitia Landon)
