Description
Book SynopsisExorbitant Enlightenment compels us to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture in new ways. This book reveals a constellation of groundbreaking pre-1790s Anglo-German relations, many of which are so radical so exorbitant that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the ways we grasp literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Regier presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: about a group of idiosyncratic figures and institutions, including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Johann Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. The books eight chapters show how these authors and institutions shake up common understandings of British literary and European intellectual history and offer a very different, much more counter-intuitive view of the period. Through their distinctive conceptions of language, Blake and Hamann articulate in different yet deeply related ways a radical critique of instrumental thought and institutional religion. They also argue for the irreducible relation between language and the sexual body. In each case, they push against some of the most central cultural and philosophical assumptions, then and now. The book argues that, when taken seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and revise some of our own critical orthodoxies.
Trade ReviewThis book deserves our attention...It offers original research, but it also critically engages and on a very high level, too with other approaches and diverging readings. This debate is even continued in the footnotes, which serve not only documentary purposes but offer substantial additional material. And Regier's own translations from the German are truly exquisite. * Christoph Bode, LMU Munich, Studies in Romanticism *
...the book recognizes the fundamental role of religious and philosophical trends too often ignored in the literature on the period. This contribution will be of great interest to those working on religion and literature, as well as intellectual history, during the period. * Alexander J. B. Hampton, University of Toronto, Religious Studies Review *
The year 2018 was already a golden moment in Blake studies, marked as it was by the publication of Alexander Regier's roundbreaking Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations (OUP). * David Womersley, Studies in English Literature *
This contribution will be of great interest to those working on religion and literature, as well as intellectual history, during the period. * Alexander J.B. Hampton, University of Toronto, Religious Studies Review *
Regier's study is a beautiful and important challenge ... [He] contends that Anglo-German relations change the way in which one understands both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book is essential to scholars of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. * The Year's Work in English Studies *
Introducing us to an eighteenth-century Anglo-German culture in London we had forgotten, one that enriches our understanding of the relations among several innovative thinkers, Regier has made a real contribution to knowledge. * B. Steven Goldsmith, The Wordsworth Circle *
Regier leaves us in no doubt that . . . the vast residue of subsequently unapproved or ignored doctrine . . . made possible the likes of Blake and Hamann. And in these our times, it is heartening to be reminded that Albion's famous prophet might have known more than a few words of German. * David Simpson, Romantic Circles *
Exorbitant Enlightenment is a compelling work of intellectual history. * Laura Quinney, Brandeis University, The Review of English Studies *
This wondrous book gauges long unrecognized eighteenth-century transactions between British and German writers ... Regier's spellbinding story of an alternative Enlightenment captures what isn't there along with what is. * Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature *
While this wonderous book gauges long unrecognized eighteenth-century transactions between British and German writers, its intellectual and imaginative scope is indeed "exorbitant" * Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
This is one of the most compelling books that I have read for some time. It deserves to be read and taken with the utmost seriousness not only by scholars of Blake, Hamann, Fuseli, and Lavater, but also by anyone interested in the shift from Enlightenment to Romantic thought in literature, philosophy, theology, and culture in eighteenth century England. * David Jasper, Review 19 *
Exorbitant Enlightenment will create something very important and timely: it will introduce a virus into our narrow and well-trod traditions of scholarship and habits of thinking with respect to our histories and theories of culture. It will join significant initiatives and projects which direct sceptical and challenging interventions at, for example, the nature of the human as distinct from the animal, the inevitability of the global as a reconciliation or agglutination of the national, the singularity and integrity of the local or specific as they determine gender or identity. * Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge *
'It is a familiar fact that no Englishman read German literature in the eighteenth century.' So wrote Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen. Regiers original study confutes this claim, along with its obverse, that the Germans were not reading the English. He shows that when Anglo-German literary relations are properly exposed, new figures emerge in fresh ways around his central diptych of Blake and Hamann -Caspar Lavater, Henry Fuseli, Solomon Gessner, the Moravians-'exorbitant' figures all, and fascinating. These new 'constellations,' Regier further shows, mean that some entrenched understandings of the relationship of Enlightenment and Romanticism need to be rethought. * James Chandler, University of Chicago *
Regier's first-order discovery of Anglo-German circuits of thought about language, religion, sexuality, nature, and social formation reveals an elaborate information highway. One of the many triumphs of this study is that it expands our field of vision even as it sharpens the focus on key practices within that field. With remarkable clarity, economy, and narrative brio, Exorbitant Enlightenment tells a truly gripping story about the most difficult artists and thinkers of the age. Like a high tide that floats all boats, Regier's contribution raises up for new appraisal the many writers we thought we had understood. Readers will close this book and say to themselves, all is changed, changed utterly. * Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Troubling Enlightenment 1: Unexpected Anglo-German Connections in Pre-1790s Britain 2: Blake and Hamann: Exorbitants 3: Crossing Channels: Fuseli, Hamann, and Lavater 4: Blake and Hamann: Poetry as Mother Tongue and the Fight against Instrumental Reason 5: The Polyglot Moravians in Eighteenth-Century London 6: A Critique of Habit: Blake and Hamann on Religion, Matrimony, and Pedagogy 7: Hybrid Hymns: Anglo-German Voices in Blake's Songs 8: Every Letter Has a Body: Blake and Hamann on the Sexuality of Language
