English Romantic Poets and their Reading Audiences
Karsten Runge
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Ruhr-University of Bochum (Faculty for Philology), language: English, abstract: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time ofaccelerating cultural, social, economic, and political change. The outbreakof the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the first Reform Bill in1832 are the political cornerstones of an age that saw the promotion ofhuman rights and civil liberties against established systems of absolutistgovernments and limited possibilities of political participation.Democratic ideas that form the constitutional basis of modern Westernsocieties were developed and circulated in a highly-charged political andcultural climate, represented, defended and contested in a bourgeoispublic sphere that had only come into being as a space of rationalcontestation in England in the century between the Glorious Revolutionand the French Revolution.1In philosophy, perhaps the most far-reaching development in theeighteenth century was the exploration of the individual psyche. JohnLocke’s empiricist epistemology was based on the idea that the mind ofthe infant is like a tabula rasa and that there are no innate ideas or moralprinciples. Instead, Locke argued, the individual’s knowledge springsfrom his or her own sensory perceptions. This epistemology carried withit a serious social problem: in effect perceivers were deprived of sharedviews and, isolated in their own perceptions, were cut off from theenvironment that had produced their knowledge. “Equally isolated fromobjects and from others, Lockian perceivers can be certain of only theirindividual mental processes. […] Certainty, knowledge, and truth become,at best, relational.”2The problem of the individual’s position in and relation to a society thatwas already perceptibly fragmenting as a result of economic developments and increased social mobility was debated by philosophersthroughout the eighteenth century. David Berkeley, the Earl ofShaftesbury, and Adam Smith all in their own ways tried to find a solutionto the empirical dilemma they had inherited from Locke and sought torelocate the individual in a social context.3 [...]1 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einerKategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).2 Regina Hewitt, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma (New York et al.: Peter Lang,1990), 5f.3 Ibid., 7-32.
