Romantic Balloons: Toward a Formalist Technology of Poetics
TL;DR: The authors traces the history of the hot-air balloon as a figure for formalist approaches to reading poetry, and finds the most compelling and enigmatic investigation of the trope in Anna Letitia Barbauld's mock-epic poem of 1797, "Washing Day."
Abstract: This essay traces the history of the hot-air balloon as a figure for formalist approaches to reading poetry, and finds the most compelling and enigmatic investigation of the trope in Anna Letitia Barbauld's mock-epic poem of 1797, "Washing Day." Anticipating Nicholson Baker, Maureen McLane, and Helen Vendler's modern uses of the hot-air balloon as a symbol for formalist literary analysis, Barbauld concludes her poem with the figure of the Montgolfier balloon as a "bubble" that is equated with the production of verse, a simile rife with anxiety about the relationship of poetics to the domestic labor of washing, but also to the manifold discourses implied by the Romantic-era balloon, such as political invasion, femininity, cosmopolitanism, and even madness. What emerges at the end of Barbauld's poem, however, is not the dismissal of eighteenth-century women's work (whether laundry or poetry) but a transhistorical model of poetic form as a technology to be operated by a close reader, an idea that subverts Cleanth Brooks' metaphor of the "well wrought urn" through Margaret Cohen's account of "craft." Resisting Brooks' notion that the poetic vessel is antiquarian, inert, and stable, Barbauld's airborne vessel, like Cohen's ships, is dynamic, labor-intensive, and buffeted by external currents. The transhistorical reach of the trope of the balloon through literary criticism that this paper traces brings into focus the reader's relation to poetic form in a new way, to ask what treating formalism as technology might mean for the conception of close reading as labor.
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01 Jan 2000TL;DR: The use of pain in the service of the ego and the colonisation of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs has been explored in this paper, where Livingstone and Kingsley describe a field for enterprise.
Abstract: List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: the practice of paradise 1. Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy 2. The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform 3. Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs 4. The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs 5. A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.
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23 Oct 2014
Abstract: Introduction: Wonder and the Rise of Fiction 1. Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment 2. Rethinking the Real with Robinson Crusoe and David Hume 3. Suspending the Reader in Tom Jones and The Castle of Otranto 4. "Marvelous Tales of Wonders Performed, or rather, Not Performed" in Baron Munchausen's Narrative 5. "A Little Voyage of Discovery?": Fiction and the Pursuit of Knowledge Epilogue
38 citations