The Marvellous and Romantic Semiotics
1975; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25599973
ISSN2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Humanities and Scholarship
ResumoIT is widely known that the Romantic poets favoured symbolic procedures, but somehow, it is less well known why they did so. The question leads, admittedly, straight into the man-traps and spring-guns of historical explanation. There is a variety of patterns to be followed. The protest principle explains that the young generation disliked what their fathers and grandfathers were doing; the anticipa tion principle explains how the seeds of a future were sown before that future; the principle of logical development explains how one state of affairs could not master the difficulties it had produced itself; the principle of adjacent causes explains that something has happened (e.g. in literature) because something else had happened (e.g. in politics). Finally, there is the reductive principle which reduces historical events to their conditions of possibility. I shall adopt the last principle and ask: what is it that made Romantic symbolism possible? And I shall argue that it was a new orientation in the theory of signs which pro vided the basis for Romantic literary theory and practice. That is to say, I shall attempt an essay in applied semiotics. History tells stories; historical explanations will have to be narrative at least to that extent that they describe a change in order to account for it.1 Let us group all sorts of remarks on the art of writing poetry and fiction under the vague heading of poetological discourse, and let this be the field of study. In order to describe a change in this field, I shall sketch the story of a single concept, of the marvellous.2 In order
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