Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen.
D. H. LawrenceThe phenomenology of introspection
One significant part of the romantics' legacy was their awareness of layers beneath human consciousness and the desire to explore them. Studying the ways in which many romantics approached this counterfoil to consciousness, or “night side of science” as one of their key proponents called it, amounts to describing the emergence of a theory. Yet the usage of the word “theory” requires some qualification, for all the tentative or emphatic references to the sub-conscious in romanticism resembled an attempted mapping out of unknown territory, consisting of assumed inner landscapes of boundless expansiveness but necessarily without much empirical data to support this undertaking. The fact that the romantics insisted on exploring this sphere by means of what were deemed dubiously pseudo-scientific methods has given critics sufficient grounds for questioning what they saw as the blunt expression of irrationality by mostly poetically minded intellectuals.
What those critics did not appreciate was the romantics' main presupposition: namely, that there is a non-rational area of human existence with its own logic and pronounced forms of, at times erratic, expression. The romantic project of exploring the non-conscious or sub-conscious stretched, incidentally, from some notes by the poet-philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (otherwise known as Novalis, 1772–1801) on psychological phenomena, to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's (1830–1916) late romantic novella in the shape of correspondence cards, Die Poesie des Unbewussten 1883 (The Poetry of the Non-conscious), which, ironically, refuses to differentiate between consciousness and non-consciousness.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.