Description
Book SynopsisIn
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession, Khalip approaches romantic subjectivity's fascination with anonymity as an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence, arguing that anonymity is an alternative model of being that resists the requirement to inhabit a social category and remains open to change and re-description.
Trade Review"Khalip explores many of the Romantic and pre-Romantic figures we hold most responsible for the cultivation and deployment of an expressive, confessional self in order to reveal, often in the very texts that would confirm this received idea, the work of a dispossession that results in various—and variously productive—forms of anonymity. Nuanced and supple in its deployment of contemporary criticism and theory, this is as original and exciting a book in Romantic studies as I have encountered in some time."—Forest Pyle, University of Oregon
"Jacques Khalip is quite brilliant in the way he explains and defines the second-generation "negation" of earlier Romantic egoism.
Anonymous Life is commanding and convincing, a most valuable contribution to Romantic literary studies and theoretical criticism." -- Jerrold E. Hogle * University of Arizona *
Table of Contents[table of contents] @fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments xxx @toc2:Rien Faire Comme une Bete: Of Anonymity and Obligation 1 Chapter One Virtual Ruin: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats 000 Chapter Two Fugitive Letters: Tracking the Anonymous in Godwin's Caleb Williams 000 Chapter Three Feeling for the Future: The Ends of Sympathy 000 Chapter Four The Art of Knowing Nothing: Feminine Melancholy and Skeptical Dispossession 000 Coda What Remains--Romanticism and the Negative 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Index 000
