Explore Praxis Archive
This Praxis volume began as two modern stagings of the 19th century play Obi; or Three-Finger'd Jack. The first staging was at the Playwright's Theater in Boston, on July 18, 2000. It included, besides staged portions of the play, papers read by Charles Rzepka, Peter Buckley, Jeffrey Cox and Debbie Lee. These papers formed the backbone of…
This dialogue is designed as a multi-linked site organized around a constellation of topoi, each with its own icon. In addition to concretizing the dialogue's overarching theme of "the commonplace," this plan serves a couple of other purposes. The first is flexibility, giving the reader the option of moving…
On June 17, 2000, the Romantic Circles MOO hosted a conference called "Romanticism and Contemporary Culture." The papers appearing in this issue by Ron Broglio, Jay Clayton, Atara Stein, and Ted Underwood were first "delivered" at that conference. That is, shorter versions of these essays were posted on a web site, and then approximately…
English Romanticism first emerged as a literary movement from a heady combination of political revolution and cosmic optimism, nowhere better expressed than in William Wordsworth's famous lines on the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" (1805 Prelude, book 10…
After deconstruction, New Historicism, and a socially aware formalism, how are we to read those works by Shelley that seem to be interventionist, The Mask of Anarchy, Swellfoot the Tyrant, the lyrics and ballads that were to be published as Popular Songs? Thus the origin of…
Why science? This is a question that long-suffering scientists must ask themselves whenever they see another attempt in the Humanities to borrow from their disciplines in order to construct new interpretive frameworks in contexts for which they must appear strangely ill-adapted. Why seek out analogies between the epistemology of quantum…
If we are to understand Romanticism as an institutional nexus with cultural, political and social effects then the challenge of articulating the relationship between literary culture and emergent forms of governmentality travels by way of the Indian sub-continent. This volume of Romantic Praxis started as a somewhat…
The idea for this forum on the Box Hill episode in Emma came almost immediately in the aftermath of a meeting of the Washington Area Romantics Group. The choice of the Box Hill episode as an object of inquiry—as something that critics with a more-than-casual interest in Romanticism might be interested in exploring —…
Within the study of Romanticism, Schelling has been best known for his unacknowleged contribution to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Although this contribution has been copiously documented by later criticism, the dense and philosophic character of Schelling's mode of exposition did not invite serious reading of…
It can be argued that Lyrical Ballads is the most significant book of poetry published in the last 200 years. The reason for this is that the poems and their authors have influenced the generations of poets who have flourished in their wake, even to the end of the 20th century. Wordsworth and Coleridge cannot have understood the full…