Date Published:
4 June, 2012
Abstract:
The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.
Pieter Vermeulen is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Stockholm University. His work in the fields of critical theory, contemporary Anglophone literature, and memory studies has been published in such journals as Arcadia, Criticism, Critique, Literature Compass, Mosaic, Postmodern Culture, and Textual Practice. His book on Geoffrey Hartman, Romanticism after the Holocaust, was republished by Continuum in paperback in the Spring of 2012. Updated March 9, 2012 Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at KU Leuven. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot through Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza and Alan Warner. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary. Updated March 5, 2014 |
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Publisher's Version
