Anonymous life; Romanticism and dispossession.

9780804758406

Anonymous life; Romanticism and dispossession.

Khalip, Jacques.

Stanford U. Press

2009

235 pages

$60.00

Hardcover

PR447

Individualism and emotional empowerment have been linked by the wrists and ankles to Romanticism in the minds of most critics for the past two decades.. Khalip (English, Brown U.) takes another view. He feels that two decades of such perceptions have run their course and it is time to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism was clearly an outcome of a search for anonymity and dispossession. He examines anonymity as a model of being, a concept that attracted the Romantics because it ran directly counter to the transparency and self-disclosure of the Enlightenment, then locates the search for anonymity in such works as Godwin's Caleb Williams. In the works of Hazlitt and Keats he finds evidence of extreme dispossession, and he also finds evidence of the art of knowing nothing in feminine melancholy and skeptical dispossession. The result is a significant new path in criticism.

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