Form, Reflection, Disclosure: Literary Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism
What is the relation between philosophy and poetry; or, rather, how might the relations in which the two continually find themselves be thought productively through aesthetics? Schlegel’s fragment frames the argument I want to develop here, not just by its insistence on a contrast between the two, but in its refusal of a ‘kingdom of barbarity beyond the boundaries of culture’: it is not a question of protecting the boundaries of culture by defending established notions of poetry and philosophy, but, instead, of exploring the ways in which both continually test the limits that tradition has erected. This, I want to claim, might productively be done by evoking once again the categories of philosophical aesthetics to rethink the ways in which poetry, literature and art have been figured in recent theoreticalwork, and to reactivate their potentials to transform experience, thought and critical practice.
Aesthetics : lectures on fine art
VOLUME II. PART III: THE SYSTEM OF THE INDIVIDUAL ARTS SECTION I: ARCHITECTURE SECTION II: SCULPTURE SECTION III: THE ROMANTIC ARTS INDEX.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.