Description
Book SynopsisWhat does hospitality have to do with Romanticism? What are the conditions of a Romantic welcome?
Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation traces the curious passage of strangers through representative texts of English Romanticism, while also considering some European philosophical “pre-texts” of this tradition.
Trade Review``Melville's analyses ... are consistently subtle, nuanced and productive of a host of questions that continue to press in upon us for answers. His close readings, even where they deal with isolated or tangental scenes of hospitality ... are compellingly rich and expansive.'' -- Markus Poetzsch -- Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008, 200808
``[A] sign of the book's success is the desire it instills in the reader to invite other texts and other thinkers to the table that Melville has set. There is a deep significance to the idea that there is a disproportion, internal to phenomenon, between manifestation and what appears in it and that there is necessarily, an excess or surplus to the phenomenon in the phenomenon, and in its self-relation. The foremost question is how to read this surplus--this `elsewhere' or beyond that paradoxically is so central to our sense of self. Ultimately, Melville is right in arguing that the manner in which we enter into relation with this surplus is intimately connected to how we read our relationship to the other. But he is also correct that precisely how the other should be read is a question that is impossible to answer just as it is impossible to ignore.'' -- Sean Dempsey, Boston University -- Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, #53, February 2009, 200909
``Based on the Derridian assumption that hospitality always entails the risk of exposing both the guest and the host to `the constitutive violence of their relationship' [and] focusing on a fascinating choice of texts.... Melville explores scenes of hospitality in Romantic writings in which the most characteristic effect is `disorientation' (320). Despite the need, even the obligation to welcome the other, the actual confrontation is inevitably discomforting.... By problematizing such relationships, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation focuses attention on an important and neglected area of Romantic studies.'' -- Ronald A. Sharp, Vassar College -- The Wordsworth Circle, Fall 2009, 200903
Table of Contents
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Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation by Peter Melville
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Reading the Foreign: Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation
- Of Mice and Women: A Preliminary Case Study for a Theory of Romantic Hospitality
- Reading the Romantic Foreign
- The Impossibility of Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation
- Chapter One: Unsettling Rousseau: Hospitality in Emile and Discourse on Inequality
- Hostile Hermit, Inhospitable Levite
- Belated Welcomes: Hospitality in Emile
- ""L'hospitalité de Calypso""
- The Sleepy Carib: Rousseau as Host
- Chapter Two: The Rights of the Stranger: Kant's ""Bond of Hospitality""
- Eating, Tasting, Hosting: Toward a Philosophy of the Dinner Table
- The Politics of Eating (with) Others
- Staging the Nation: Hospitable Performances in the Anthropology
- International Hospitality and the Conditioning of a Perpetual Peace
- On the Foreigner in Perpetual Peace
- Chapter Three: Coleridge and the Poetics of Hospitable Failure
- A Mouse in the House
- Coleridge and the Fort-Da Game of Hospitality
- The Case of ""Christabel""
- The Fluttering ""Stranger"" and the Failure of the Hospitable Imagination
- Two Too Many Sisters: Coleridge's Discursive Homelessness
- Chapter Four: Hospitality without End: ""Visitation"" and Obligation in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
- The ""Work"" of Lionel's Narrative and the Death of the Reader
- Animal Hospitality and the ""Lure"" of Language
- Visiting the Sibyl
- Plague as Metaphor and the History of Disease
- ""Visitations"" of the Plague
- Ryland's Pineapples, England's Hospital
- Foreign Bodies / Foreign Infections (Conclusion)
- Conclusion: Romantic Hospitality to Come
- Guest as Allergen
- Unspeakable Acts: Toward a Hospitality to Come
- Works Cited
- Index
