Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism

by Christopher Bundock

Overview

Romantic writers invoked prophecy throughout their work. However, the failure of prophecy to materialize didn’t deter them. Why then do Romantic writers repeatedly invoke prophecy when it never works? The answer to this question is at the heart of Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism.

In this remarkably erudite work, Christopher Bundock argues that the repeated failure of prophecy in Romantic thought is creative and enables a renewable potential for expression across disciplines. By focusing on new readings of canonical Romantic authors as well as their more obscure works, Bundock makes a bold intervention into major concepts such as Romantic imagination, historicity, and mediation. Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism glides across Kant’s Swedenborgian dreams to Mary Shelley’s Last Man and reveals how Romanticism reinvents history by turning prophecy inside out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442630727
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	10/27/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Christopher M. Bundock is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Prophecy and the Temporality of Being Historical

1 Secularization and the New Ends of History

2 Prophecy within the Limits of Reason Alone

3 Ghostlier Demarcations: Mysticism, Trauma, Anachronism

4 Beyond the Sign of History: Prophetic Semiotics and the Future's Reflection

5 The Future of an Allusion: Temporalization and Figure in Lyrical Drama

6 Auguries of Experience: Impossible History and Infernal Redemption

7 The Preface and Other False Starts: Prophesying the Book to Come

8 "a woman clothed in the Sun": Female Prophecy and Catastrophe

Afterword

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

David Baulch

"I am impressed by the sheer number of difficult texts Christopher Bundock takes up and handles in his work. His readings of all of the texts central to the project strike me as not only sound but quite often dazzlingly insightful."

Jonathan Sachs

"Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism　is that rare book: deep and conceptually ambitious, but marked by a clarity in its willingness to wrestle with abstraction and complexity that will surely make it a book to reckon with for years to come. By putting core Romantic texts into dialogue with Continental philosophical traditions Bundock offers an important new argument about how the spiritual persists into the presumed secularization of modernity."

Editorial Reviews

" Romantic Prophecy casts an impressively wide net, one that not only encompasses a vast array of literary and philosophical texts but that, for this reason, makes itself relevant to literary historians, theologians, and historians of science alike, not to mention the Romanticists who remain its target audience."

—John Patrick James, University of California, Berkeley, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol 52 3

"This book is theoretically subtle, attuned to the transformative power of negation, and builds its argument chapter by chapter with extraordinary command. Its account of how the changing experience of time can lead to "subjective displacement" and create space for critique makes this book an important contribution to Romantic studies."

—David Sigler, University of Calgary, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018

"Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism　is that rare book: deep and conceptually ambitious, but marked by a clarity in its willingness to wrestle with abstraction and complexity that will surely make it a book to reckon with for years to come. By putting core Romantic texts into dialogue with Continental philosophical traditions Bundock offers an important new argument about how the spiritual persists into the presumed secularization of modernity."

—Jonathan Sachs, Department of English, Concordia University

"I am impressed by the sheer number of difficult texts Christopher Bundock takes up and handles in his work. His readings of all of the texts central to the project strike me as not only sound but quite often dazzlingly insightful."

—David Baulch, Department of English, University of West Florida

From the Publisher

"Romantic Prophecy casts an impressively wide net, one that not only encompasses a vast array of literary and philosophical texts but that, for this reason, makes itself relevant to literary historians, theologians, and historians of science alike, not to mention the Romanticists who remain its target audience."

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol 52 3 - John Patrick James

"This book is theoretically subtle, attuned to the transformative power of negation, and builds its argument chapter by chapter with extraordinary command. Its account of how the changing experience of time can lead to "subjective displacement" and create space for critique makes this book an important contribution to Romantic studies."

University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018 - David Sigler