Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James JoyceThis 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
Friedrich Schlegels Theory of the Fragment | 29 |
Gender and Genre in Aristophanes | 54 |
The Gender Politics of Joyces Theory | 134 |
From the Sublime to the Ridiculous Is But a Step | 155 |
Hornes Sublime Porte in Ulysses | 169 |
In the Wake of Criticism | 190 |
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Common terms and phrases
absence aesthetic ALP's arabesque Aristophanes Aristophanes's artist audience beauty becomes beloved Bertha body Buchstabe chapter character Charakteristik classical comedy comic concept conflict context Critical Writings Dead Awaken dithyrambic drama epistolary novel essay Exiles fact fantasy feelings female fictive figure Finnegans Wake fragment freedom 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 letter literally literary literature lovers Lucinde Lucinde's male man's masculine maternal mode modern mother nature novel object origin parabasis philosophy play poetry Portrait present reader realism reality reflection relation rhetorical Richard Robert romantic romantic poetry romanticism sense sexual simply social spirit stage Stephen Dedalus Stephen Hero sublime symbolic synthesis textual theory tion traditional tragedy truth ugliness Ulysses unity universal vision wahre Wilhelmine woman women words young Joyce