Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce: The Labor-Liberal AllianceThis is the first book to extensively study Joyce's work in the context of Germanic Romantic literary theory. It illustrates how Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel finds its theoretical roots in Friedrich Schlegel's conception of the Romantic, fragmentary novel. Verstraete discusses the relevance of Schlegel's early Romanticism to the young Joyce's essays on symbolic-realistic drama and argues that what has traditionally been described as Joyce's personal appropriation of Hegel's dialectics can better be understood in terms of Schlegel's ironic approach to philosophy. She relates Schlegel's concepts of irony and of the fragment to his feminist critique of nineteenth-century bourgeois art, and of Kant's categories of the beautiful and the sublime. She argues that Schlegel's ironization of the sublime yields a rhetorical subversion of the opposition between male artist and female model, art and reality, as well as between the sublime and the beautiful. Verstraete illustrates this critical and political force of what she calls the "feminine sublime" at work in Schlegel's essays on Greek comedy and in his novel Lucinde. The book demonstrates how the Romantic (feminine) sublime, as the site where autonomous art generates its own critique, offers us the tools with which to interpret Joyce's postmodern innovations of Romantic art. |
Contents
Friedich Schlegels Theory of the Fragment | 29 |
A History of the Sublime | 37 |
Gender and Genre in Aristophanes | 54 |
The Romantic Novel Lucinde | 64 |
From Addressing to CrossDressing Some Afterthoughts on Lucinde | 109 |
Joyces Drama and the Conflicts of Realism | 116 |
The Gender Politics of Joyces Theory and Practice of Drama | 134 |
From the Sublime to the Ridiculous Is But a Step | 155 |
Medicine Midwifery and the Making of Childbirth Hornes Sublime Porte in Ulysses | 169 |
In the Wake of Criticism | 190 |
Conclusion | 215 |
Notes | 221 |
| 253 | |
| 269 | |
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Common terms and phrases
absence aesthetic ALP's arabesque argued Aristophanes Aristophanes's artist audience beauty becomes beloved Bertha body Book of Kells Buchstabe chapter character classical comedy comic concept conflict context Critical Writings Dionysus dithyrambic drama epistolary novel essay Exiles fact fantasy feelings female feminine fictive Finnegans Wake Firchow fragment Friedrich Schlegel Geist gender genre gesture Greek Greek comedy Hegel Hence Ibsen Ibsen's idea ideal imagination ironic irony James Joyce Joyce's Joycean Julius Julius's Kant KFSA Kristeva language letter literally literary literature lovers Lucinde Lucinde's male man's maternal mode modern mother nature novel object origin parabasis philosophy play poetry Portrait present Purefoy's reader realism reality reflection relation rhetorical Richard Robert romantic romantic poetry sense sexual simply social spirit stage Stephen Dedalus Stephen Hero sublime symbolic synthesis textual theory tion traditional tragedy trans truth ugliness Ulysses unity universal vision woman women words young Joyce
Popular passages
Page 3 - definition of the epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.