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Romantic Microethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2021

Alexander Freer
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Abstract

Ethical thought typically aims to provide a general account of the good. This essay explores a form of localized ethical attention through British Romantic writing that eschews that aspiration, privileging individual cases in all their detail and particularity. This form, which I term “microethics,” is small in two senses, permitting extremely close observation of individual cases and limiting itself to equally small conclusions. It is most recognizable in poetry but recurs across fiction, drama, and philosophical prose. Considering such thinking allows us to assess and extend recent arguments for the value of Romanticism's small and marginal forms. While Romantic microethics develops in opposition to emerging utilitarian thought and the politically repressive conditions of the 1790s, it anticipates a range of later forms, from Adorno's ethical fragments to deconstruction to anthropological method. At once literary and philosophical, it binds both writing and reading practices to acts of singular attention.

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Essays
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PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 5 , October 2021 , pp. 746 - 761
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Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

I am grateful to audiences at the British Association for Romantic Studies Conference in York, the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere, and the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Seminar at Cambridge for their responses and to Anna Berman, Ardis Butterfield, Philip Connell, Stacey McDowell, Danny Smith, and Ross Wilson for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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