Imagination Under Pressure, 1789-1832:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Utilityby John C. Whale
This ambitious study offers a radical reassessment of one of the most
important concepts of the Romantic period--the imagination. In contrast
to traditional accounts, John Whale locates the Romantic imagination
within the period's lively and often antagonistic polemics on aesthetics
and politics, focusing in particular on British responses to the French
Revolution and the ideology of utilitarianism. Through detailed analysis
of key texts by Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Hazlitt, Cobbett
and Coleridge, this book seeks to restore the role of imagination as
a more positive force within cultural critique.
Contents: Introduction; 1. Burke and
the Civic Imagination; 2. Pain's attack on artiface; 3. Wollstonecraft,
imagination and futurity; 4. Hazlitt and the limits of sympathetic imagination;
5. Cobbett's imaginary landscape; 6. Coleridge and the afterlife of
imagination; Afterword
2000 256 pp.
0521772192 Hardback $60.00
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