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6 Ungovernable passions: intoxication and Romanticism He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through intoxication. (Charles Lamb) Hence the drunkard ceases to attend to external stimuli, and as volition is now also suspended, the trains of his ideas become totally inconsistent as in dreams or delirium. (Erasmus Darwin) The question above all others that nagged at philosophers, political thinkers and doctors throughout the eighteenth century was: ‘What is it to be human
2 Appetites, passions, and disgust: the penalties and paradoxes of unmanliness Introduction Unmanliness was emblazoned on emotionalised bodies, written onto illformed, unappealing forms and faces, and deployed through disgust, the very antitheses of desire. This too had physiognomic roots and moral associations. Johann Caspar Lavater, for example, explained: ‘the morally best, the most beautiful. The morally worst, the most deformed.’1 Eighteenth-century British moral philosophers similarly drew analogies between the corporeal and the moral, applying a
Elemental Passions CHAPTER 4 Interpretive synopsis of Elemental Passions One: prologue The first chapter can be regarded as a Prologue. Irigaray begins with short, staccato sentences. White. Immense spaces. White, a rush of breath. Be swift, marry this breath. Remain in it. Make haste. Let it not abandon me. Let me not turn from it. Be swept up: my song. (EP 7) De grands espaces. Blancs. Un grand souffle, blanc. Rapide, épouser ce souffle. Y rester. Dans la hâte. Qu’il ne m’abandonne pas. Que je ne le laisse pas.Y être entraînée : mon chant. (Pe 7) The short
no expense in pursuing his passion – the building of a hothouse stood testament to his botanical ambitions. 111 He employed a gardener, Joseph Knight, who resided full time on the property, tending to the collection. Knight remained in George’s employ until the family removed from Clapham in 1820, at which point he gave Knight his living collection. Knight went on to form the
promised to eradicate bad passions. As he told the inhabitants of New Lanark: ‘When these great errors shall be removed, all our evil passions will disappear; no ground of anger or displeasure from one human being towards another will remain; the period of the supposed Millennium will commence, and universal love prevail.’ 1 While Owen shared with other radicals the belief that conditions could and should
back to families, 9 helped to keep the existence and significance of colonies continually in the forefront of the public imagination. Earlier manifestations It is important to recognise that in the British case, these imperial passions were not wholly new in the nineteenth century. Kathleen Wilson has charted the significance of aspects of popular imperialism in the eighteenth
4 On waves of passion: London 1860 L ondon was the fountainhead of international statistics. Adolphe Quetelet enjoyed visiting the British capital. Early in his career he had discovered that many British thinkers shared his vision of statistics. He had a hand in the establishment of the Statistical Section (Section F) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Statistical Society of London. In 1851 he chose the Great Exhibition of London as the stage for launching the European statistical congress. He expected the British to be very
This book takes a fresh look at British radicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century from the perspective of the new and burgeoning field of the history of emotions. It represents a major challenge to the ways in which historians have studied political culture in modern Britain by showing how we must break away from teleological assumptions about the rise of the rational public sphere. Politics did not just revolve around ideas, power, organisation and practice but also feeling. This project raises questions fundamental to politics in every age: should the public sphere be a domain free from feeling, or at least one where restraint is exercised? What are the consequences for democratic polities where either affective restraint, or its opposite, excess, operates? Are there occasions when public displays of feeling are acceptable (or less acceptable), and, if so, when and why?
This article explores the more detached and ironic view of Blake that emerged in the 1970s compared to appropriations of him in the 1960s, as evident in three science-fiction novels: Ray Nelson’s Blake’s Progress (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), and J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company (1979). In adopting a more antagonistic posture towards Blake, all three of these books reflect increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards the countercultures of the 1960s, and can be read as critical of some of those very energies that the Romantic movement was seen to embody. Thus Nelson rewrites the relationship of William and Catherine, in which the engraver comes under the influence of a diabolic Urizen, while Carter recasts the Prophet Los as a Charles Manson-esque figure. Even Ballard, the most benign of the three, views Blakean energy as a release of potentially dangerous psychopathologies. In all the novels, we see a contrarian use of misprision, rewriting Blake as Blake had rewritten Milton.