Abstract: “The Consumption of Values – Judgment, Authority and Aesthetics in the Formation of the Romantic Literary Canon”
While Ann Radcliffe is most famous for her three major novels as well as her important theoretical distinction between horror and terror in the early Gothic novel, the latter has been famously linked to the female Bildungsroman, violent revolution, and the Kantian sublime. Yet many neglected early Gothic novels contain a far greater psychological complexity, morality, and traumatic depth than previous categorizations, such as, the “female Gothic” or the category of canonic literature seem to imply.
While Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya (1806) is often relegated to the genre of erotic Gothic, much of the hitherto published criticism on Ann Radcliffe focuses on her three most popular novels rather than the more literally obscure Castles of Athlin and Dunbane (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790). In considering the value of literature in light of the Romantic canon, this presentation thus intends to explore questions of aesthetic and literary judgment and its role in the formation of a canon that excluded much feminist and Gothic fiction.
After all, European Romanticism “discovered the past as past and completed the transition from a received heritage to a conscious, reflective confrontation with tradition” (Hohendahl). In thinking about the concept of literary value during the Romantic period, this presentation moves from a Kantian aesthetic judgment as being separate from political and moral ones to ideas of “value”, “authority”, “worth” and “judgment” in Kant, Gottfried Herder or A. W. Schlegel, as well as the ways in which these ideas were translated into early British canon formation by their contemporaries Coleridge and Wordsworth.
In constituting not just value but a culture per se, reflections about valuable literary works “confront the reader, the consumer of values” (Guillory) and impact the desirability of such a canonic reconsideration in light of intrinsic or extrinsic value of the literary work. Where Wordsworth sees the social constitution of literature in crisis with the canonical form of the latter, interpretations of “value” and “authority” play out in the contested field of High Culture production and “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Guillory). From the viewpoint of the neglected works, this presentation explores the adaptation and rejection of German ideas regarding canon formation in the English Romantic realm and its peculiar interpretations of ideals of value and judgment, in some ways, even genius in authorship.
Bio: University of Applied Sciences, Trier, Germany
After studying at the University of Mannheim in Germany for my Bachelor’s and Master’s and completing a year of studying and teaching abroad at UNC Chapel, I received my Doctorate Degree from Purdue University in Comparative Literature. Since 2010, I have been a full-time permanent lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences – Environmental Campus Birkenfeld in Trier (Germany), where I am teaching English for Academic Purposes, Intercultural and Communication, as well as Digitalization / Environmental / Business Studies. I have published on the topic of spiritual geographies of trauma, motherhood in 18th-century Germany, the discipline of Comparative Literature, humanity and ethics of German filmmaking, and the nature of the criminal as well as memory and image in early German film in various anthologies. I have been to numerous conferences and theory seminars, including the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, Deleuze Conferences, and other venues, such as, Harvard, Yale, Cologne University, as well as in Britain, Italy, and Mexico City. In the last two years, I have completed and have been working on publications on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German, American and British novels, for instance, in A Companion to Kate Chopin, Gothic Modernisms, Hawthorne and the Gothic, and The Monstrous Mother. I am also actively involved in conference planning, our campus’ children’s university, internal and external presentations on economics, digitalization, language didactics and literature.