Description
Book SynopsisThrough a series of theoretically informed readings, this book explores the uncanny effectivity of history in its seeming absence in canonical works by Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire written in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848.
Trade Review“Friedman has written a powerful, rigorous, and intense work that combines in an original and advanced way two of the most vital (and hitherto usually antagonistic) directions of post-structuralist literary criticism: historicism and deconstruction. And she accomplishes this feat of strategic positioning without sacrificing her considerable tactical skills for local reading. Mediating between broad theoretical reflection and the closest kind of textual scrutiny, her readings are throughout inventive, adept, capable of surprise.”—Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Table of ContentsAbbreviations; Introduction; 1. Burke's sublime object as object of idealogy; 2. History in the background of Wordsworth's 'Blind Beggar'; 3. The letter and the spirit of the law: Wordsworth's restagings of the French Revolution in The Prelude; 4. Manifestations of the body politic: Keats's Hyperion; 5. From the war in heaven to engagement on earth: repetition in a different tone in The Fall of Hyperion; 6. Baudelaire's theory of practice: ideology and difference in 'Les yeux des pauvres'; 7. Theorizing commoditites/the commodification of theory: Baudelaire's 'Assommons le pauvres!' Between Proudhon and Marx; Notes; Index.
