The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACT

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.     

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on ideas actualized in history

ABSTRACT

Situating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, although it occurs through mainly fumbling – or else overenthusiastic – human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). It has been argued that Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.     

The history and philosophy of social science

Carlo Ginzburg is best known as the author of a popular and widely commented work of microstoria Il formaggio e i vermi, published in 1976. Rather than focusing on Ginzburg's contributions to the genre of microstoria, or on the development of his long and very productive scholarly career, my aim in this article is to reflect on a set of themes that recur, with impressive persistence, in his work, from his earliest publications in the mid-1960s, to his most recent works. Above all, I suggest that two elements recur in his work, and that these, jointly, impart upon it its defining character. They are the concern with epistemological issues of knowing, and the ethical conception of the historian's work, which Ginzburg expressess and defends with urelenting rigour.     

3. DECENTERED IDENTITIES: THE CASE OF THE ROMANTICS

Natalie Zemon Davis's work has decentered the identities of her subjects as part of seeing their complexity. This essay, inspired by Davis's rich thought and scholarship, looks at the ways in which the Romantics in the arts decentered their thought and practices away from the West. Their decentering involved serious study of non‐Western thought and its incorporation into their art, and the regular use of opium to shape their creative works. One borrowed theme was transcendence to a higher mode of existence, often through sexual union with a woman. So influential did Romantic tropes, themes, and images derived from outside the West become that they persisted in Western culture long after the Romantics themselves had lost interest in the body of non‐Western culture from which they drew. Examples include the work of Samuel Coleridge, Walter Scott, Hector Berlioz, the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Günderode, Sidney Owenson, and others.