Romanticism, Enlightenment and Mediation

This chapter examines the knowledge strategies of the self. The popular poet Edward Young and the author and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld use the figure of the “inner stranger” to reconcile a transcendental soul with a mundane self. Through a reading of the way Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes up the same figure (in “Frost at Midnight”), the chapter traces a secularizing movement from a “porous” to a “buffered” self, so the enigmatic equivocations of this “inner stranger” mediates the appearance of a distinctively modern concept of the unconscious it (or Id) within the self.

Aesthetics · Art · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Mediation · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Romanticism · Social science · Sociology · Soul · Transcendental number · Unconscious mind · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Psychology · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory