Research Catalog

Title

Fatal autonomy : Romantic drama and the rhetoric of agency / William Jewett.

Author

Jewett, William.

Publication

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiv, 262 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

Describing an enduring moral puzzle and explaining how it helped shape a key moment in the history of poetic drama, Fatal Autonomy represents Romanticism as a reckoning with the costs of individual agency. No moral calculus can ever fully determine the relation of events to an individual's actions and failures to act, William Jewett argues; that is why the stubborn belief in such a relationship gives rise to tragedy. Jewett maintains that tragic drama forces its readers and viewers to confront the ways in which the use of language grants agency. The Romantic poets saw a moral challenge in that confrontation and followed its generic implications toward a new kind of poetry. Fatal Autonomy thus looks to Romantic drama to explain how Romantic poetry came to hold a permanent grip on conceptions of moral life. Tracing the source of major strains in British Romanticism to a politically charged body of dramatic poems, Jewett focuses on two historical moments: 1794-97, which he describes as the political turning point in the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and 1819-22, the years in which he believes Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron wrote their best poetry.

Subject

• Agent (Philosophy) in literature
• Autonomy (Psychology) in literature
• English drama (Tragedy) > History and criticism
• English drama > 19th century > History and criticism
• Moral conditions in literature
• Political plays, English > History and criticism
• Romanticism > Great Britain
• Self in literature
• Verse drama, English > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

pt. 1. Tragic Agents and the Origins of Romanticism, 1794-1797. 1. The Sublime Machine of History: The Fall of Robespierre and Wat Tyler. 2. The Claim of Compulsion: The Borderers. 3. Fancy and the Spell of Enlightenment: Osorio -- pt. 2. Shelley, Byron, and the Body Politic, 1819-1822. 4. Performing Skepticism: The Cenci. 5. Fatal Autonomy: Marino Faliero. 6. History's Lethean Song: Charles the First and The Triumph of Life.

ISBN

0801433525 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^97012337^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library