Literature and Authenticity 1780 1900 Essays in
Honour of Vincent Newey 1° Edition Michael Davies
digital version 2025
https://ebookfinal.com/download/literature-and-
authenticity-1780-1900-essays-in-honour-of-vincent-newey-1-edition-
michael-davies/
★★★★★
4.8 out of 5.0 (50 reviews )
PDF Available Immediately
ebookfinal.com
Literature and Authenticity 1780 1900 Essays in Honour of
Vincent Newey 1° Edition Michael Davies Pdf Download
EBOOK
Available Formats
■ PDF eBook Study Guide Ebook
EXCLUSIVE 2025 ACADEMIC EDITION – LIMITED RELEASE
Available Instantly Access Library
We have selected some products that you may be interested in
Click the link to download now or visit ebookfinal.com
for more options!.
The Importance of Insight Essays in Honour of Michael
Vertin 1st Edition John J. Liptay
https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-importance-of-insight-essays-in-
honour-of-michael-vertin-1st-edition-john-j-liptay/
Infection of the Innocents Wet Nurses Infants and Syphilis
in France 1780 1900 1st Edition Joan Sherwood
https://ebookfinal.com/download/infection-of-the-innocents-wet-nurses-
infants-and-syphilis-in-france-1780-1900-1st-edition-joan-sherwood/
Ambiguities of Empire Essays in Honour of Andrew Porter
Robert Holland
https://ebookfinal.com/download/ambiguities-of-empire-essays-in-
honour-of-andrew-porter-robert-holland/
Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France essays in
honour of Keith Cameron Cameron
https://ebookfinal.com/download/conceptions-of-europe-in-renaissance-
france-essays-in-honour-of-keith-cameron-cameron/
Technology and Organization Essays in Honour of Joan
Woodward 1st Edition Nelson X. Phillips
https://ebookfinal.com/download/technology-and-organization-essays-in-
honour-of-joan-woodward-1st-edition-nelson-x-phillips/
International Law making Essays in Honour of Jan Klabbers
1st Edition Rain Liivoja
https://ebookfinal.com/download/international-law-making-essays-in-
honour-of-jan-klabbers-1st-edition-rain-liivoja/
Christianity and the African Imagination Essays in Honour
of Adrian Hastings 1st Edition David Maxwell
https://ebookfinal.com/download/christianity-and-the-african-
imagination-essays-in-honour-of-adrian-hastings-1st-edition-david-
maxwell/
Knowledge Innovation and Internationalisation Essays in
Honour of Cesare Imbriani 1st Edition Piergiuseppe Morone
(Editor)
https://ebookfinal.com/download/knowledge-innovation-and-
internationalisation-essays-in-honour-of-cesare-imbriani-1st-edition-
piergiuseppe-morone-editor/
Were We Ever Protestants Essays in Honour of Tarald
Rasmussen Sivert Angel (Editor)
https://ebookfinal.com/download/were-we-ever-protestants-essays-in-
honour-of-tarald-rasmussen-sivert-angel-editor/
Literature and Authenticity 1780 1900 Essays in Honour
of Vincent Newey 1° Edition Michael Davies Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Michael Davies, Ashley Chantler (editor)
ISBN(s): 9780754665991, 0754665992
Edition: 1°
File Details: PDF, 1.78 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
Literature and Authenticity,
1780–1900
Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey
Edited by
Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw
Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
For Vince
The echoes will again become the living voice.
Literature and Authenticity,
1780–1900
Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey
Edited by
Ashley Chantler
University of Chester, UK
Michael Davies
University of Liverpool, UK
Philip Shaw
University of Leicester, UK
First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw and the contributors 2011
Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw have asserted their rights under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Styler, Rebecca.
Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey.
1. Authenticity (Philosophy) 2. Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Self in
literature. 4. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. I. Newey, Vincent.
II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Davies, Michael, 1970– IV. Shaw, Philip.
820.9’008–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Michael, 1970–
Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey / edited by
Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English
literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Truthfulness and
falsehood in literature. I. Davies, Michael, 1970– II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Shaw, Philip.
IV. Newey, Vincent.
PR453.C47 2011
820.9’353—dc23
2011025664
ISBN 9780754665991 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315592619 (ebk)
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion 9
Michael Davies
2 Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’? Robert Southey and Anna Seward 25
Lynda Pratt
3 Undefinitive Keats 39
Nicholas Roe
4 ‘A Kind of an Excuse’: Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited 51
Michael O’Neill
5 Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and
Cardinal Newman 67
Bernard Beatty
6 Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying 81
Philip W. Martin
7 A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’: Authentic Images of India and the
Orient in the Works of British Romantic Women Poets 91
A.R. Kidwai
8 Becoming Ruskin: Travel Writing and Self-Representation
in Praeterita 107
Keith Hanley
9 Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity in
Henry Irving’s King Lear 119
Richard Foulkes
10 The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell 131
Joanne Shattock
vi Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
11 Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic
in Cranford 141
Nick Davis
12 Thoreau and Creeley: American Words and Things 155
Geoff Ward
13 The Robust Way: ‘The Man Said, No’ 167
Philip Davis
14 From Cowper to Conrad: Authenticity at the End of the Century 179
Ashley Chantler
Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey 191
A Vincent Newey Bibliography 195
Bibliography 201
Index 221
List of Contributors
Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of
Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of
St Andrews. He is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (Croom Helm, 1985) and Byron’s
Don Juan and Other Poems (Penguin, 1987). He has edited three collections of
essays on Byron and written on Romanticism, the Bible and aspects of literary
theory. He was editor of the Byron Journal from 1986–2004. Pending publications
address the theological idea of beauty, Byron and religion, Shelley and theatre, and
Victorian bric-a-brac.
Ashley Chantler is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester.
His publications include Heart of Darkness: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008)
and, as co-editor, Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Rodopi,
2009) and Studying English Literature (Continuum, 2010). He is currently writing
a monograph on Ford’s poetry, and co-editing Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction
(Rodopi).
Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool.
He has research interests in English literature of the Renaissance and Restoration
periods, focusing especially on the literary and religious cultures of seventeenth-
century England. He has published essays on a range of writers, from Shakespeare
to William Cowper, and is the author of Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative
in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Hamlet:
Character Studies (Continuum, 2008).
Nick Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His
publications include Stories of Chaos: Reason and Its Displacement in Early
Modern English Narrative (Ashgate, 1999), the ‘Inheritance: c.500 to c.1300’
section in The Medieval European Stage, ed. William Tydeman (Cambridge
University Press, 2001), and essays on medieval, Renaissance and modern writing,
as well as on narrative theory. He is currently working on Models of Causation
in English Renaissance Drama, which examines relations between scientific
paradigms of thought and the shaping of dramatic action.
Philip Davis is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research
into Reading at the University of Liverpool. Recent publications include Sudden
Shakespeare (Athlone, 1996), The Victorians 1830–1880 (Oxford University
Press, 2002), Shakespeare Thinking (Continuum 2007), Bernard Malamud: A
Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Why Victorian Literature Still
Matters (Blackwell, 2008). He is currently working on a biography of George
Eliot for Oxford University Press and an edition of the complete works of Bernard
Malamud for the Library of America.
viii Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
Richard Foulkes is Emeritus Professor of Theatre History, University of
Leicester. His publications include Church and Stage in Victorian England
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), Performing Shakespeare in the Age of
Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian
Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Ashgate, 2005). Recent edited volumes are
Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation (Ashgate, 2008) and Lives of Shakespearian
Actors: William Charles Macready (Pickering and Chatto, 2010). He is chairman
of the Society for Theatre Research.
Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. He is
the editor, with David Thomas, of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth-Century
Contexts (Routledge), and has edited and co-edited numerous essay collections,
including, with Greg Kucich, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations
Past and Present (Routledge, 2008). He has written extensively on Wordsworth,
including Wordsworth: A Poet’s History (Palgrave, 2001), and on Ruskin, including
John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 1837–1838: Travelling North (Mellen Press, 2007).
He was principal investigator for the AHRC project on ‘John Ruskin, Cultural
Travel and Popular Access’, among the disseminations from which is, co-authored
with John Walton, Constructing Cultural Travel: John Ruskin and the Direction of
the Tourist Gaze (Channel View, 2010).
Abdur Raheem Kidwai is Professor of English and Director of the UGC
Academic Staff College at the Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is also Visiting
Professor at the School of English, University of Leicester. His publications
include Literary Orientalism: A Companion (Viva, 2009) and, as editor, Stranger
Than Fiction: Images of Islam and Muslims in English Fiction (APH, 2000) and
Behind the Veil: Representation of Muslim Women in Indian Writings in English
1950–2000 (APH, 2007).
Philip W. Martin is Pro Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. His
publications include Byron: A Poet Before His Public (Cambridge University
Press, 1982) and Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987).
He has also published, as editor, English: The Condition of the Subject (Palgrave,
2006), and as co-editor Reviewing Romanticism (Macmillan, 1992). He has been
an editor of the journal Literature & History since 1989, and is currently working
on the history of handwriting in the Romantic period.
Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His recent
publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in
British, American, and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), Wheel, a
volume of poems (Arc, 2008), and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English
Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Twentieth-Century British and Irish
Poetry: Hardy to Mahon, co-edited with Madeleine Callaghan, was published by
Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.
Lynda Pratt is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of
Nottingham. She has published widely on Southey and his circle. Her current
projects include The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (2009 onwards), of which
she is general editor, and a monograph on Romanticism and provincial culture.
List of Contributors ix
Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His
publications include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford
University Press, 1988), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford
University Press, 1997), The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some
Contemporaries (Palgrave, 2002), Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt
(Pimlico, 2005), and, as editor, Keats and History (Cambridge University Press
1995), Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (Routledge, 2003) and English Romantic
Writers and the West Country (Palgrave, 2010). He has recently completed a new
biography of Keats for Yale University Press.
Joanne Shattock is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University
of Leicester. She is General Editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, 10 vols
(Pickering and Chatto, 2005–2006), of which she has edited volume 1. Her most
recent publication is, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature,
1830–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently editing, with
Elisabeth Jay, a 25-volume edition of the Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant
(Pickering and Chatto, 2011 onwards). With Vincent Newey, she co-edits The
Nineteenth Century series for Ashgate.
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester.
He has research interests in Romantic poetry and prose and the visual arts. His
publications include The Sublime (Routledge, 2006), Waterloo and the Romantic
Imagination (Palgrave, 2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture
and Conflict, 1789–1822 (Ashgate, 2000). He has also written articles on
Wordsworth and Byron, William Godwin, eighteenth-century military painting,
and Goya’s Disasters of War. From 2008 to 2010 he was co-investigator for the
AHRC-funded Tate Research project The Sublime Object. He is the reviews editor
for the Byron Journal and a fellow of the English Association. At present he is
working on a book-length art historical study entitled Suffering and Sentiment in
Romantic Military Art.
Geoff Ward is Vice Principal at Royal Holloway, and Professor of English and
Creative Writing at the University of London. His publications include Statutes of
Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993; rev. ed. Palgrave, 2001). A Fellow
of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Institute of Directors, he is also
an editor of the Cambridge Quarterly. Other recent work includes preparing a
programme on the writings of David Foster Wallace for BBC Radio, and he has
just completed his own first novel.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the contributors for their essays and for their
patience while waiting for this volume to be finished. We would also like to thank
those who wanted to honour Vince with an essay but were unable to do so due
to various constraints on the book, including Bill Hutchings, Rod Mengham,
Brian Nellist, Alan Rawes, Martin Stannard, Greg Walker and Nigel Wood.
We are sincerely grateful to Ann Donahue at Ashgate, who wholeheartedly
supported the volume from the outset and generously offered suggestions and
encouragement during its completion. The first draft of the bibliography was
compiled meticulously by Rosamund Brown. Some aspects of Chapter 1 were
explored in an article published in Bunyan Studies, 12 (2007); for permission to
revisit this material here, thanks are owed to Bob Owens. Parts of Chapter 10 first
appeared in an essay, ‘Gaskell the Journalist: Letters, Diaries, Stories’, in Elizabeth
Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction (Gent: Academia Press, 2010),
edited by Sandro Jung, who has granted permission for the author to draw on this
work again. We also acknowledge the help and support of Nathan Pendlebury, at
National Museums Liverpool, in granting us permission to reproduce the cover
image, the original of which is held at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Last, but
by no means least, we also thank Sue Newey, for providing and checking certain
details for the ‘Afterword’ on this volume’s honorary dedicatee, Vince.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Introduction
Literary critics can sometimes be heard complaining of the disparity they feel
between their official pronouncements on literature – the things the ‘profession’
conditions them to say – and the things they would really like to say. As if to
compensate for this disparity, a career in criticism may sometimes conclude with
a semi-autobiographical piece in which the critic reflects on the vivid, emotional
encounter with literature, usually experienced in late adolescence, that set them
on their way. Wordsworth, in Book 5 of The Prelude (1805), provides us with a
paradigmatic case:
I am sad
At thought of raptures now for ever flown,
Even unto tears I sometimes could be sad
To think of, to read over, many a page,
Poems withal of name, which at that time
Did never fail to entrance me, and are now
Dead in my eyes as is a theatre
Fresh emptied of spectators.1
As always, with Wordsworth, despondency at ‘thought of raptures now for ever
flown’ gives way to ‘sober truth’ and ‘conscious pleasure’. Yet, even as deeper,
sustaining joy supplants the wild ecstasies of youth, something of that primal
experience survives, confirming the presence of ‘Visionary power […] / Embodied
in the mystery of words’ even in the tawdriest of childhood fancies.2
Memories of those first encounters with books, which attest to the power of
the literary, thus confirm the poet/critic in his vocation. The problem, of course,
is that access to those ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’3 is made difficult, if not
impossible, by the very self-consciousness that prompted the thought of their loss.
And then the larger questions arise: is the memory of their loss real? Are those
glimpses of authentic being not themselves a symptom of critical alienation, a
fantasy formation of the professional reader in desperate need of validation? Faced
with such conundrums, the mind collapses, ‘Even as a broken mirror, which the
glass / In every fragment multiplies’. And yet, as Byron goes on to state, while the
‘one’ may be replicated infinitely ‘still’, that ‘one’ still remains the ‘same’. The
thought, in other words, that drove the critic to dismiss the distinction between
1
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 5, ll. 568–75; The Major Works, ed.
Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 448.
2
Ibid., ll. 566, 568, 619, 621.
3
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’, ll. 85–6; ibid., p. 133.
2 Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
the ‘thousand images’ of his alienated identity and the authentic ‘one that was’ is
overcome by the stubborn insistence of the voice that would silence such thought.4
The felt disparity between the official and unofficial promptings of the critical
mind is ably conveyed by Matthew Arnold:
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel – below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel – there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.5
What one feels ‘indeed’ is the memory of a summer evening, sitting on one’s
bed, ‘reading as if for life’, shedding tears at the death of Magwitch, willing Lear
to sanity, or struggling to comprehend the moral and psychological forces that
impel Isabel Archer’s return to Rome.6 Reading not ‘for life’ but ‘as if for life’,
we become informed by the paradoxical vitality of fiction, a qualitative distinction
best understood by comparing David Copperfield’s affirmation of the difference
between reading and life with the self-abnegating conclusion of Washington
Square (1881): ‘Catherine, meanwhile in the parlour, picking up her morsel of
fancy work, had seated herself with it again for life – as it were.’7 Henry James’s
‘as it were’ reverses the progressive work of Dickens’s ‘as if’, forcing the creative
dissimilarity between one thing and another, which in David Copperfield (1849–
1850) has become the very principle of spontaneous generation, to a dead, yet
strangely dignified, stop. We say ‘dignified’ because Catherine’s life sentence, her
disappearance from narrative development, is self-initiated. She seats ‘herself’,
rejecting a cad’s proposal of marriage for a life that, from a worldly point of view,
seems offensively stolid. James’s ‘as it were’ contains multitudes: the subjunctive
tells us of the difference between the formal and the practical – Catherine will not
literally be sat at her ‘fancy work’ for life, but she may as well be – and by doing
so it tells us something about the quizzical or hedging consciousness that cannot
quite endorse the generative potential of metaphor. Perhaps in the end, James, no
less than Catherine’s father, is the prisoner of his own irony, unable to recognise
that in committing to a ‘morsel of fancy work […] again’ as if ‘for life’, Catherine
could be demonstrating the connection between literature and authenticity.
4
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 289–92 (1816); The
Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 113;
emphasis added.
5
Matthew Arnold, ‘Below the surface-stream […]’; The Poems of Matthew Arnold,
ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), p. 543.
6
The phrase ‘reading as if for life’ and the accompanying recollections are taken
from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin, 1996),
p. 60.
7
Henry James, Washington Square, ed. Mark Le Fanu (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 196.
Introduction 3
What is interesting about the difference between ‘as if’ and ‘as it were’ is that
in both cases a yearning for actuality is hemmed in by an acknowledgement of the
futility of such a yearning. In the ‘as if’ formulation we say that something could be
the case even though we know that it cannot literally be the case. This is, of course,
what makes John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) such
a momentous and vital account of spiritual conversion. At key moments, usually
upon the very threshold of epiphany, Bunyan declares not just that ‘I did’ or ‘I had’
but that ‘I […] was as if I had […] seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me’,
and that ‘I was as if I had seen him born, as if I had seen him grow up, as if I had
seen him walk thorow this world’.8 It is this oft repeated incantation – not ‘it was
as if’ but, more crucially and astonishingly, ‘I was as if’ – that amounts to a leap
of faith for Bunyan: a soterial step towards a state of being that can be conditional
and uncertain yet still affirmative and progressive.9 Thus, in ‘reading as if for
life’, even as we accept the impossibility of such a notion we nevertheless feel, by
imaginative assent, that it ought to and indeed could be true. By contrast, when we
commit to ‘as it were’, we seem to place a stranglehold on our capacity for assent;
‘as it were’ appears to be tough-minded, clear-sighted and more authentic than
‘as if’, but it can also be irresolute and benighted, its tasteful archness concealing
more than a hint of bad faith. To be true to oneself, to be real, is to acknowledge
the emotionally untidy, unutterable and risky beginnings of our engagement with
literature: reading as if for life.
Authenticity in art, as in life, is not reproducible. And yet our best responses to
art endeavour to recapture the sense of what it might be like to dwell in proximity
to the origins of the work of art. What is it in the work of literature that impels
us to make this gesture? According to Aristotle, the creation of art differs from
other forms of production in that it possesses itself in its own end (telos).10 By
combining the word enteles (complete, fully formed) with echein (the continuing
effort to maintain completion) to form entelechy, Aristotle sought to distinguish
artworks from products that exist only in terms of their use or availability. In
contrast to the industrial product, the entelecheia or artwork is characterised not
only by its ability to grasp its end in itself but also by its energeia or ‘being-at-
work’. The sense of energeia that resonates here is its link with kinesis, understood
as movement or change. We recognise the authentic in art when we are moved
to change our perception of that which we thought we knew. But the moment in
which we change involves not just a shift in perception, but an alteration of being
so jolting that until that moment we never knew ourselves.
8
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 10, 38; emphasis added.
9
Bunyan uses the formula ‘I was as if’ elsewhere in Grace Abounding: see ibid.,
pp. 80–81, 100.
10
For this discussion of Aristotle, I am indebted to Giorgio Agamben, The Man
Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),
pp. 60–67.
4 Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben’s study of the condition of
art in modernity, the waning of the artwork’s energetic aspect, the quality that
marks it out as recognisably authentic, is linked with the rise to dominance, in the
eighteenth century, of the figure of ‘the man of taste’. For Agamben, the Kantian
definition of the beautiful as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’, and
the subsequent emptying out of the energetic, emotional or sensory qualities of
artistic production, results in a form of spiritual paralysis.11 Within the mind
of such a man:
taste has worked like a sort of moral gangrene, devouring every other content
and every other spiritual determination, and it exerts itself, in the end, in a
total void. Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this
certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The
very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of
producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends.12
These remarks emerge during the course of a suggestive reading of Hegel’s
response to Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (1762), a satirical account of a young
man’s pursuit of good taste at the expense of his moral awareness. For Hegel,
Rameau’s ability to judge, but not to create, is indicative of the division between
art and spectatorship, genius and taste, which marks the development of Western
art. Rameau is inauthentic because he can only judge, not ‘grasp’, the innermost
truth that the artwork reveals. As Agamben argues, following Hegel, the only
way Rameau can reach ‘self-possession’ is by acknowledging this inconsistency,
negating himself, and thereby finding himself again as the object of his own
self-division.13
As many of the essays in this collection attest, English literature is similarly
marked by the struggle to sustain the pro-ductive, energetic aspects of the act of
creation. While it may or may not be the fate of literature to look back, hopelessly,
at its lost origins, finding itself only as the object of its own self-division, this
straining for completion attests, nevertheless, to the endurance of a certain
desire to be. Like the energy released in the metaphoric connection ‘as if’, the
power of literature is born out of the gap between fiction and the real. Within
this gap, the sensitive reader, as opposed to the man of taste, strives relatedly to
grasp what Lionel Trilling calls ‘the marvellous generative force that our modern
judgement assigns to authenticity’; generative in the sense that authenticity is not
a state to be achieved but is always a process to be worked at or put into action.14
Authenticity resides, then, not in the overcoming of self-division, but in the labours
that gesture towards such overcoming.
11
Ibid., p. 1.
12
Ibid., p. 23.
13
Ibid., p. 26.
14
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press,
1972), p. 12.
Introduction 5
The essays in this volume respond to the energeia of literature in a variety of
ways. For Michael O’Neill, in his essay on Wordsworth and Shelley, and for Philip
Martin, writing on Byron, Bowles and Pope, the focus is on the creative yield
of literary rivalry. For Bernard Beatty and Geoff Ward, writing respectively, but
from very different perspectives, on the relations between writing and the world,
the emphasis falls on the efforts of poets to reach beyond the realm of signs. As
Ward suggests, in the course of his essay on Thoreau and Creeley, while authors
know that ‘words can never be the things they describe’, they write in the belief
that words ‘are also their own things; […] their distance inclusive of a kind of tacit
neighbourliness’. What authentic reading strives for is a related form of proximity,
a mode of close attention that responds to what Philip Davis describes, after Adam
Ferguson, as the ‘animated spirit’ in which the work was written.
The connection between authenticity and energeia provides us with a fresh
way of negotiating the paradoxes of selfhood. In Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’
Ode (1807; 1815), ‘shadowy recollections’ of authentic bliss are ‘yet the fountain
light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing’, so that, despite the
heavy ‘weight’ of ‘custom’, we may yet rejoice that ‘in our embers / Is something
that doth live’.15 That the primacy of this ‘something’ can only be asserted and
not substantiated is beside the point. The Wordsworthian child, unlike Rameau,
does not find himself merely as the object of his own self-division: he does not,
like the Lacanian subject, misrecognise himself as a unified being concealing
an underlying lack; nor, for that matter, does he believe himself solely to be a
product of the transformational power of discourse. While theory reduces the
pro-creative origins of the self to a retroactive or constructed cause, for Wordsworth
authenticity persists in energetic gleams and promptings, in those ‘first affections’
that ‘are yet’ the foundation of our being.
It must be acknowledged that not all the essays in this volume would support
this claim. The search for the authentic self in letters and biography, highlighted
by Lynda Pratt (on Southey), Nicholas Roe (on Keats), Keith Hanley (on Ruskin)
and Joanne Shattock (on Gaskell), reminds us that the attempts by writers and
critics to single out a deep or abiding self, determined ‘wholly by the laws of its
own being’, is qualified, in each case, by messy actuality: the untidy influences
of interpersonal, psychological and historical forces that work to shape a life
beyond one’s conscious control.16 The problem of how, precisely, to convey
the authenticity of a life or, for that matter, the essence of a work of art (see,
for example, Richard Foulkes’s essay on Henry Irving’s production of King
Lear), or the truth about another country (see A.R. Kidwai’s essay on Romantic
representations of India), is an indication of how the real continues to resist the
imposition of form.
15
Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, ll. 152, 154–5, 130, 132–3; The Major Works, pp. 300–301;
emphasis added.
16
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 99.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
Meteorology - Learning Objectives
Spring 2024 - Faculty
Prepared by: Prof. Smith
Date: July 28, 2025
Unit 1: Statistical analysis and interpretation
Learning Objective 1: Research findings and conclusions
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 2: Historical development and evolution
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 3: Historical development and evolution
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 4: Best practices and recommendations
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Learning Objective 5: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Example 5: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Best practices and recommendations
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 8: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 8: Literature review and discussion
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Study tips and learning strategies
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Lesson 2: Interdisciplinary approaches
Practice Problem 10: Best practices and recommendations
• Experimental procedures and results
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Case studies and real-world applications
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Remember: Fundamental concepts and principles
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Study tips and learning strategies
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 14: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 15: Case studies and real-world applications
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Definition: Fundamental concepts and principles
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Current trends and future directions
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 19: Key terms and definitions
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Results 3: Literature review and discussion
Important: Key terms and definitions
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Current trends and future directions
• Ethical considerations and implications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 23: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Practical applications and examples
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Example 24: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Practice Problem 25: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Key terms and definitions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 26: Key terms and definitions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 27: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Practice Problem 27: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Best practices and recommendations
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Key terms and definitions
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Background 4: Literature review and discussion
Important: Comparative analysis and synthesis
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Key Concept: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 32: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Key Concept: Literature review and discussion
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Definition: Fundamental concepts and principles
• Critical analysis and evaluation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Practice Problem 34: Case studies and real-world applications
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Current trends and future directions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Literature review and discussion
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 37: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Example 37: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Theoretical framework and methodology
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 38: Practical applications and examples
• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 39: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Note: Problem-solving strategies and techniques
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Introduction 5: Ethical considerations and implications
Note: Key terms and definitions
• Interdisciplinary approaches
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 41: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Practice Problem 41: Research findings and conclusions
• Historical development and evolution
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Note: Key terms and definitions
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Key Concept: Best practices and recommendations
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 44: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Experimental procedures and results
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Case studies and real-world applications
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Definition: Interdisciplinary approaches
• Learning outcomes and objectives
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 47: Assessment criteria and rubrics
• Comparative analysis and synthesis
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 48: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Important: Theoretical framework and methodology
• Statistical analysis and interpretation
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
Note: Current trends and future directions
• Assessment criteria and rubrics
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
[Figure 50: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
Practice 6: Comparative analysis and synthesis
Remember: Study tips and learning strategies
• Case studies and real-world applications
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Important: Best practices and recommendations
• Fundamental concepts and principles
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Example 52: Statistical analysis and interpretation
• Research findings and conclusions
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade
Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!
ebookfinal.com