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Romantic Alienation Reconsidered
Eric K.W. Yu
Department of English
National Dong Hwa University
Abstract
Ever since the mid-1940s, due to such influential “visionary” Romantic scholars
as Frye, Abrams, Bloom and Hartman, the portrait of the English Romantic poet as a
solipsist alienated from his society has been grossly exaggerated and firmly
established. Turning away from “ego romance,” Leftist critics use crude economic
models to account for Romantic poets’ social alienation.
More recent
Deconstructionist and New Historicist criticism, in fact, have not gone very far to
radically question the deeply problematic understandings of Romantic alienation.
Having recourse to the study of the history of reception, the present paper offers a
comprehensive critique of Romantic alienation. Borrowing from Hegel’s and
Marx’s notions of labor and alienation, the writer tries to rethink Romantic alienation
in relation to the rise of professional literary reviewing and the politics of taste during
the Romantic Period.
Keywords: alienation, history, reception, Romantic, selfhood