What associates fragmentation with Romanticism? In this 2010 book, Alexander Regier explains how fracture and fragmentation form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism can be analysed in a particularly effective way. These categories also supply a critical framework for a discussion of fundamental issues concerning language and thought in the period. Over the course of the volume, Regier discusses fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, offering new readings of Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period. He also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man. More generally, Regier's discussion of fragmentation exposes a philosophical problem that lies behind the definition of Romanticism.
• Examines significant form of creative literature and thought in the Romantic period • Offers new readings of the fragment in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats and De Quincey • Draws new conclusions about the general intellectual and aesthetic importance of the fragment in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries
Contents
Broken origins: an introduction; 1. A brotherhood is broken: Babel and the fragmentation of language; 2. Figuring it out: the origin of language and anthropomorphism; 3. Forces trembling underneath: the Lisbon earthquake and the sublime; 4. A blue chasm: Wordsworth's The Prelude and the figure of parenthesis; 5. Letters from the grave: John Keats's fragmented corpus; 6. The doubling force of citation: De Quincey's Wordsworthian archive; 7. Philological fractures: Paul de Man's Romantic rhetoric.
Reviews
Review of the hardback: 'This is a valuable study with much to offer on the problem of language in Romantic discourse, on the question of Romanticism more generally, and on our relationship to it. The book presents an incisive and resourceful intervention in current critical debates around Romantic culture, and Regier's consistently sophisticated and often illuminating readings repay careful attention as well as detailed critical engagement.' Andrew Bennett, New Books on Literature
Review of the hardback: 'This is a valuable study with much to offer on the problem of language in Romantic discourse, on the question of Romanticism more generally, and on our relationship to it. The book presents an incisive and resourceful intervention in current critical debates around Romantic culture, and Regier's consistently sophisticated and often illuminating readings repay careful attention as well as detailed critical engagement … the book constitutes a consistently engaging study which helpfully enlarges our sense of the fragment in Romantic culture, and of what Romanticism might be, how it might work, and how it encompasses and still directs our thinking about nature, language and the human.' Review 19 (nbol-19.org)
'Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism is clear and persuasive, and provides a fresh way of thinking through the importance of Romanticism then and now.' The Year's Work in English Studies
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