Romanticism Essays -- Romantic Period Essays

RomanticismIn spite of its representation of potentially diabolical and satanicpowers, its historical and geographical location and its satire onextreme Calvinism, James Hoggs Private Memoirs and Confessions of aJustified Sinner proves to be a novel that a dramatises a crisis ofidentity, a theme which is very much a Romantic concern. Discuss.Examination of Romantic texts provides us with only a limited and muchdebated degree of commonality. However despite the disparity ofRomanticism (or Romanticisms) as a movement it would be true to saythat a prevalent aspect of Romantic literature that unites many divergent forms of the movement, is a concern with the divided self.As the empirical Rationalism of the eighteenth century was partiallysubverted by the subjective metaphysical reflection in the ordinalartists tended to examine wider issues from an introspective startingpoint. The idea of the divided self became a motif from BlakesAlbion to Byrons Manfred to Keats musings on the disas sociatednature of the Poetic Self. Some writers personified this division in manifest physical manifestations, usually a hero and his inversedoppelganger. Most famously in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, thevarious selves in De Quinceys Confessions of an English Opium Eaterand in the Gordian mirroring of major characters in James Hoggsambiguous masterpiece Private Memoirs and Confessions of a JustifiedSinner.Although critics (as Andrea Henderson in Romantic Identities) havedebated the extent that Romanticism dramatises divisive crises withthe mental self , the vast majority of writing on the subjectagrees that crisis of identity is certainly a Romantic concern.Hugo Donelley draws attention to the Modernis... ... Doubleness of Hoggs Confessionsand the Tradition, Studies in stinting Literature, Vol. 18, pp.59-74.Punter, D. The dialectic of persecution in The Literature of TerrorVolume I, 1996, Longman Group (David Punter), London and New York.Simpson, L. James Hogg, a Critical Study, 1 962, Oliver and Boyd,Edinburgh.Wittig, Kurt. The Scottish Tradition in Literature, 1958, Oliver andBoyd, Edinburgh.Wu, Duncan. institution in Romanticism An AnthologyWEBSITES.http//prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/4C/R.Incorvati.htmlIncorvati, R. Dialogue and Marginality in James Hoggs Confessions ofa Justified Sinner. Prometheus Unplugged Website.---------------------------------------------------------------------1 Although Hogg was writing in a pre-Freudian era the essentials of his psychodynamic theory were as pertinent in 1834 as they were in 1934.