British State Romanticism contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of their late work as evidence of declining abilities. Frey argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model that adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.
British State Romanticism contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of their late work as evidence of declining abilities. Frey argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model that adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.
British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism
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British State Romanticism contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of their late work as evidence of declining abilities. Frey argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model that adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804773485 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 539 KB |
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British State Romanticism
AUTHORSHIP, AGENCY, AND BUREAUCRATIC NATIONALISMBy Anne Frey
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6228-1
Chapter One
Fragment Poems and Fragment NationsThe Aesthetics of Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Late Work
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is famous as a writer of fragments. "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" (which are or claim to be unfinished) are his most oft-cited examples. But Coleridge also wrote or spoke in fragments in his in marginalia, in the prose Aids on Reflection, and in the scattered remarks recorded in his Table Talk. Even his completed essays frequently set aside points for further discussion in work he promises but never completes. Indeed, several critics have suggested we should consider the fragment the Coleridgean genre. Sympathetic critics generally cite the poetic fragments as a symptom of Coleridge's lofty vision: his imagination is too powerful and too evanescent, his ambition for a perfect work too comprehensive, to be actually embodied in verse. The fragment, in this view, is simply the flip side of Coleridge's philosophy of organic form. Because he cannot envision a whole that adequately unifies his disparate ideas, he is reduced to fragments. In this chapter, I argue that the same aesthetic philosophy that produces the fragment extends into Coleridge's political writing. Like the other authors I call "State Romantics," Coleridge in his late career believes that the state's bureaucracy manages national identity by actively forming individuals into national citizens. And he envisions the established state Church as the framework that best shapes individual character, training individuals' perceptions and reconciling each with the whole they together form. But as Coleridge uses organic form to consider the relationship between the individual citizen and the state, and the relationship between Britain and its component regions, the problem facing readers of his poems and marginalia-how do we know a fragment from a poem, an unfinished part from a whole of its own?-enters into his thinking on the relationship between Britain and Ireland.
Like many of his contemporaries, Coleridge saw the status of Ireland within Britain as an insoluble problem. When he defines this problem, he uses his aesthetic vocabulary of parts and wholes: Ireland should be simply a part of Britain, but the Irish people experience "love of a part as of a whole." He uses similar language in the "Aids to an Appreciation of the Catholic Bill" (at the conclusion of On the Constitution of the Church and State) when discussing the Catholic issue: "A great numerical majority of the inhabitants of one integral part of the realm profess a religion hostile to that professed by the majority of the whole realm: and a religion, too, which the latter regard, and have had good reason to regard, as equally hostile to liberty, and the sacred rights of conscience generally." Indeed, in On the Constitution of the Church and State and in his bitter and vitriolic essays on the Irish question, Ireland resembles a fragment: it is a region that should be part of another nation but yet attempts to stand on its own. Examining Ireland as a fragment demonstrates how Coleridge conceives the British state through his aesthetic categories and, conversely, how he envisions the state structuring aesthetic perception. For Ireland as for Coleridge's poetic fragments, the whole that would give structure and meaning to the individual part is incomplete. In the case of Ireland, however, the "whole" that Coleridge argues should assimilate the part is not a matter of imaginative vision but of state administration. Regions like Ireland are a problem for Coleridge because they stand outside of the state Church (which Coleridge views as a bureaucratic agency that forms individual identities) and outside of other agencies that interpellate citizens into the state.
The status of the "political fragment" derives from the model of nation that Coleridge develops in his late career. Coleridge's early poetry relies on visionaries (such as Joan of Arc in "Destiny of Nations") to intuit their national identity and spread their message to the populace. In these poems, Coleridge insists that government gets in the way of freedom: "those feelings and that grand ideal of Freedom which the mind attains by its contemplation of its individual nature, and of the sublime surrounding objects ... do not belong to men, as a society, nor can possibly be either gratified or realized, under any form of human government; but belong to the individual man, so far as he is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration of God in Nature." In his late career, however, Coleridge no longer trusts individual visionaries to interpellate their countrymen into a national identity. Instead, he imagines that the very state he earlier found incapable of providing individual freedom must now do exactly that. Coleridge suggests that the state's administrative structures provide the frame through which individuals form personal and collective identities. Coleridge still in part claims the nation as his personal vision: he insists that he as a philosopher studies history and analyzes the direction in which the nation is tending, and therefore he knows Britain's true shape in a way that the populace obviously does not. The fulfillment of this vision, however, depends not on his individual intellect or imagination but on whether the state's administrative structures fully penetrate each region of the state and interpellate its peoples. Further, he redefines his model of symbol and symbolic representation to operate through state administration.
Coleridge's turn to Church and state is part of a conservative political philosophy, and his contemporaries and later detractors critiqued this conservatism, along with his impenetrably obtuse language and his profusion of journalistic writing. We miss the interest of Coleridge's late project, however, if we view him as simply conservative. Coleridge models a form of state bureaucracy that is active and positive. In the case of Ireland, it is also illustrative in the way in which it fails. Even at its most convincing, Coleridge's vision of the Anglican Church is as much prescriptive as descriptive; although he claims to study the history and structure of the Church, he is never sure that the current Church performs the functions he theorizes for it. Nevertheless, the Church's inability to incorporate Ireland into the British state ultimately raises questions about Coleridge's organic philosophy, in ways he acknowledges only at the end of his life. Even if his vision of an organic state unified through the institutions of the established Church is ultimately impossible, studying his vision for the Church and the state demonstrates how Coleridge revises his high Romantic literary theory to suggest that imagination, symbol, and organic form work through a bureaucratic state organization, and to participate in the project of authorizing Britain's colonialist expansion. Before turning to the case of Ireland, I will begin by examining how Coleridge defines organic form and applies his model of form to the state.
Organic Form and the State
Throughout his career, Coleridge uses organic form to conceive the relationship between individuals and the social totality. Coleridge follows the Kantian imperative that insists all individuals must be recognized as ends in themselves. And Coleridge believes that for an individual to be an end in itself requires self-determination. However, even as Coleridge insists that we consider each individual and each part freely self-determining, he also envisions each individual as a part contributing a designated function to the whole. Organic form is Coleridge's solution to this conundrum: organic form is a totality in which each part's internal tendencies follow the very form and function the whole demands. Although he applies organic structures to social forms, Coleridge first defines the term "organic" as an aesthetic category. In his Lectures on Shakespeare (1812), Coleridge (paraphrasing Schlegel) distinguishes organic from mechanic forms: "the form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the material ... the organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within." The Shakespeare lectures discuss the example of poetry, but because they conceive poetry as a "living body," they raise the question of form, and specifically the relationship of part and whole, more broadly. A "living body," Coleridge suggests, "must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living Body is of necessity an organized one-& what is organization, but the connection of Parts to a whole, so that each Part is at once End & Means!" (495). That a part must be both end and means has important implications for Coleridge's application of organic theory to political entities. If we focus simply on Coleridge's distinction between mechanic and organic forms, we might take an "organic" state to follow Rousseau's social contract, in which the people of a nation determine what government will rule them. Coleridge, however, defines the organic state more particularly: the organic state does not simply rise from the bottom up but instead balances the needs of the citizen with the needs of the whole and determines that individuals' free choices are the same that the nation's destiny demands. The British state forms individuals' perceptions in a manner that makes them choose British citizenship. Defining the nation as "organic," then, allows Coleridge to conceive the reconciliation of particular and general, individual freedom and social totality. One essay from The Friend describes this balance:
[T]he true Patriot ... will reverence not only whatever tends to make the component individuals more happy, and more worthy of happiness: but likewise whatever tends to bind them more closely together as a people.... But much as he desires to see all become A WHOLE, he places limits even to this wish, and abhors that system of policy, which would blend men into a state by the dissolution of all those virtues which make them happy and estimable as individuals.
An organic state unifies its populace but only as the people themselves choose to become a nation.
Coleridge's account of organic form is clearest when he treats poems and plants. In the third of his Lectures on European Drama (1812), he uses the relationship of a plant to its environment to illustrate the kind of balancing organic form entails:
[E]very living object in nature exists as the reconciliation of contradictions, by the law of Balance-The vital principle of the Plant can make itself manifest only by embodying itself in the materials that surround it.... On the other hand, it takes [these materials] up into itself, forces them into parts of its own Life, modifies and transmutes every power by which it is itself modified: & the result is, a living whole, in which we may in thought & by artificial Abstraction distinguish the material
from the indwelling Spirit, the contingent or accidental from the universal & essential, but in reality, in the thing itself, we cannot separate them. [Lect. on Lit., I, 447]
Plants must necessarily absorb materials from the environment in order to grow, and these materials of course exert a determining influence on the plant. The tree will only grow in an environment that is conducive to its growth (an acorn will not sprout in a desert). However, we do not say that the plant is any less a free and self-determining agent because environmental conditions affect its shape. The shape and identity the plant takes-for instance, the tendency of an acorn to grow into a tree-conforms to both its "indwelling spirit" and the contingencies of its environment. Indeed, Coleridge suggests that the conditions of its growth make each tree appear different, but it is still recognizable "as an ash or a poplar" (Lect. on Lit., I, 358). For Coleridge, the plant's dependence on its environment does not limit the plant's autonomy but in fact enables it. Where the plant grows expresses both free will (the plant's drive to grow) and fate (that its seed lands where conditions are conducive).
Extending his model to people, Coleridge reads even the need to conform to one's environment as providing room for free will: "The Fate must conquer, as far as the event is concerned; but the free determination remains unconquered, & preserves itself either by voluntary chosen Submission, or by voluntary Death" (Lect. on Lit., I, 448). Both trees and humans can refuse to conform to their environments, but death may be the result. While such a formulation might seem unremarkable in the case of plants, when speaking of humans, calling the decision between conformity and death a free choice is more troubling. But for Coleridge, limited choice does not mean lack of freedom. In a marginal comment to Fichte he notes, "zwang or compulsion is not the same as Necessity, nor Choice (willkuhr) the same as Freedom-On the contrary, Necessity and absolute Freedom are one," just as in "the assent of the mind to a mathematical demonstration." Just as the plant's conformity to environmental conditions does not impinge on but in fact enables its freedom to grow, humans also should recognize necessity as a source of freedom. And for the human, environmental conditions include social influences, such as nationality and class structures. Coleridge suggests that such restrictive identities actually enable human self-determination. His formulation slides between Burke's argument that "freedom includes the freedom to be restrained" and Foucault's description of power as productively forming individual identities. No individual can develop without constraints, and Coleridge views these constraints as actively forming rather than limiting individual identity.
The state is one element of the "necessity" confronting humans. Coleridge insists that the state does not constrict individuals, because the state is responsible for creating the very identities each citizen will freely choose. Nevertheless, in the name of individual freedom he also emphasizes that states must act with restraint. To make the government more compatible with individual freedom, Coleridge argues that the government should not act directly on individuals but instead on the organizations-such as the clergy-that produce individual behavior. In the "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher" (1814), Coleridge describes the state's action through the metaphor of a supervised stream:
As the Warden and Inspector of a navigable stream confines his attentions to its depths and shoals; to its banks, indentations, promontories and reaches; yet thus preserves most effectively the component waters from at once losing themselves, and ruining the adjacent lands by inundation: in like manner does a Legislature appropriate its regards to the permanencies of a State, to the supporting skeleton and the containing vessels, of the Body Politic, to its ranks, estates, conditions, customs, and offices; yet by these means provides eventually, though indirectly, for the perpetual flux of the persons, proportioned channels and a regulated impulse, a quick and vigorous, yet healthy and tranquil, circulation. [EOT, II, 386-87]
In describing the state through the duties of the "Warden and Inspector of a navigable stream," Coleridge emphasizes the importance of indirect state guidance. The nation's "circulation"-its commerce and public sphere-requires government regulation, but the government regulation must be compatible with individual freedom. Coleridge insists that the government must act indirectly to preserve individual freedom (EOT, II, 387). The best way to cultivate citizens is to focus on the organizations that mold them, creating a stable governing structure and educational and religious institutions that extend into every corner of the nation.
Even as Coleridge advocates indirect regulation, his vision of the organic state nevertheless emphasizes that a single administrative apparatus oversees all. Coleridge's insistence that the state serve as a mediating force makes him suspicious of any group that seeks to appropriate state functions, even those claiming charitable purposes. Without the state's balancing influence, he believes, such groups create fringe interests that give way to radicalism and prove so demanding to members that they harden into tyranny. He in particular criticizes groups that demand an oath from members "without the authority or known acquiescence of the supreme power" (the state); these oaths create new social forms that threaten traditional social structures (EOT, II, 380-81). Coleridge especially condemns political reform societies (which he compares to Jacobins) and trade unions and guilds (which he says focus on "Lording it over their employers") (EOT, II, 393). But he also complains that participants in voluntary societies more generally are motivated by vanity: he traces interest in societies and voluntary organizations to "the sweet lust of power and management, and to the delight of beholding in printed reports and circular letters their own names and busy doings, their orations and donations, motions and emotions"; and claims they find "moral titillation" in "their mummery, presidentships, chairmanships, and secretaryships" (EOT, II, 394). Coleridge thus argues for a strong central state that would prevent individuals from inflating their own power and from forming societies that exclude themselves from the nation as a whole. He insists that the government mediates the entire society's competing interests. And the agency that operates both indirectly and under the auspices of the state to interpellate citizens is the state Church.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................viiIntroduction: Literature and the State in Post-Napoleonic Britain....................1
1. Fragment Poems and Fragment Nations: The Aesthetics of Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Late Work....................21
2. Wordsworth's Establishment Poetics....................54
3. Speaking for the Law: State Agency in Scott's Novels....................88
4. A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen's Persuasion....................116
5. De Quincey's Imperial Systems....................140
Notes....................165
Index....................199