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Author Jewett, William

Title Fatal autonomy : Romantic drama and the rhetoric of agency / William Jewett
Published Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 262 pages)
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
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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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Print version record
Subject English drama -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Verse drama, English -- History and criticism
Political plays, English -- History and criticism
English drama (Tragedy) -- History and criticism
Autonomy (Psychology) in literature.
Agent (Philosophy) in literature.
Moral conditions in literature.
Romanticism -- Great Britain
Self in literature.
DRAMA -- General.
Agent (Philosophy) in literature
Autonomy (Psychology) in literature
English drama
English drama (Tragedy)
Moral conditions in literature
Political plays, English
Romanticism
Self in literature
Verse drama, English
Drama
Englisch
Politisches Handeln
Engels.
Toneelstukken.
Politiek.
Autonomie (algemeen)
Geschichte 1794-1822.
Great Britain
Englisch.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781501744525
1501744526