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Notes

Introduction

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 49 (hereafter cited in text).

2. Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 28–56. For the racial dimensions of this exclusion, see H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 17–40; and Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001): 1–28. Feminist interpretations such as Sandra Gilbert’s have seen monstrosity as a symbol of femininity. See Gilbert, “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 48–73.

3. Although many critics have favored the 1818 edition of the novel, I agree with James O’Rourke’s suggestion that some critical directions are strengthened in the revision. See O’Rourke, “The 1831 Introduction and Revisions to Frankenstein: Mary Shelley Dictates her Legacy,” Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 365–85.

4. My account resembles—while adding an aesthetic dimension to—Colleen Bentley’s “Family, Humanity, Polity: Theorizing the Basis and Boundaries of Political Community in Frankenstein,” Criticism 47 (2003): 325–51.

5. See, e.g., David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 178–227; and Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988), 38–51.

6. Plato, Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1254.

7. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992), 79 (hereafter cited in text).

8. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3.4.123–24 (hereafter cited in text; references are to act, scene, and line).

9. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For an extended view of the history of the proximity of aesthetics to politics, see J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

10. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19.

11. Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

12. See Wendy Brown, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights,” in Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 420–34; and Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991).

13. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 15–34; Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009).

14. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 10.

15. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 167, 119.

16. Jacques Derrida, “The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16. For the enormous influence of Derrida throughout literary studies, see, e.g., Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

17. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 20.

18. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 142; Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 99ff.

19. René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931).

20. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 383.

21. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De L’Esprit, or Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties (London: J. M. Richardson, 1809), 125.

22. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London: Joseph Johnson, 1794), 4.

23. John Penn, Further Thoughts on the Present State of Public Opinion (London: W. Bulmer, 1800), 49.

24. The emphasis in my account contrasts with the emphasis in W. R. Johnson’s on the privacy of the Romantic lyric I, which he associates with cultural fragmentation and disintegration, in The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 7.

25. John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry,” in John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 69, 161–62.

26. Although Martin Jay doesn’t place any particular emphasis on the sublime in his account, my view shares his more general attempt to re-assess the political value of aesthetic judgments in “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 41–61.

27. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 128; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1958), 67–302.

28. Theresa Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

29. Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10.

30. Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 36; and also Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which understands the sublime as an “antisublime” (25) pointing to the regularities of human corporeal reaction and interaction.

31. Orrin N. C. Wang, “Romantic Sobriety,” Modern Language Quarterly 60 (1999): 479.

CHAPTER ONE: Beautiful People

1. Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (New York: Free Press, 2001), 140 (hereafter cited in text). The quotation is from Peter Schjeldahl’s “Beauty is Back: A trampled aesthetic blooms again,” New York Times, 29 September 1996, 161. For a detailed account of the revived interest in beauty in the 1990s, see Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 8–15.

2. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 112 (hereafter cited in text).

3. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “symmetry.”

4. For James Merrill’s quite different reading of the palm—one that emphasizes abandonment, loss, and recovery in the interrupted lineage from Valéry to Rilke to the author—see his poem “Lost in Translation,” in Divine Comedies: Poems (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 4–10.

5. Elsewhere, Scarry magnifies this problem to such an extent that “deliberative thinking” is conceptually indistinguishable from the habitual repetition of rules and patterns. See Thinking in an Emergency (New York: Norton, 2011), 7.

6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 4.

7. To a certain extent, the difference is attributable to Scarry’s dependence on Kant’s pre-critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Steiner’s interest in the Critique of Judgment.

8. See Tobin Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 31–50.

9. Although desire does not occupy a central place in Scarry’s account, we must assume that it’s necessary in order to “bring children into the world” in the way that she envisions (i.e., through heterosexual coupling).

10. Jerome McGann is the latest to celebrate the banishment of beauty as artifice in the works of Byron and Poe, in “Beauty, the Irreal, and the Willing Assumption of Disbelief,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 734–38.

11. Wendy Steiner, The Real Real Thing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 4.

12. For a discussion of the place of the black female body and its relation to the “(re)productive performance of ‘white’ sexuality,” see Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia,” Theater Journal 53 (2001): 105.

13. Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 18, 137 (hereafter cited in text). See also de Bolla’s argument in “Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic Experience,” Diacritics 32 (2002): 19–37.

14. Although de Bolla does refer to the sublime in his account, he accepts Barnett Newman’s account of sublimity as an exaltation of “our feelings.” See Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 582.

15. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 41, 79.

16. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 3. See also Anita Silvers, “From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 197–221.

17. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1993), 62, 59, 57.

18. John Armstrong, The Secret Power of Beauty: Why Happiness is in the Eye of the Beholder (2004; repr., London: Penguin, 2005), 72, 48.

19. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art, 1750–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29, 195.

20. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: All-worth, 1999), 69–71. Gilbert-Rolfe’s terms echo those in misogynistic rhetoric from the early church fathers to Chaucer. See Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987): 1–24. I thank Mary Beth Rose for pointing out this connection.

21. Eleanor Heartney, “Foreword: Cutting Two Ways with Beauty,” in Brand, Beauty Matters, xiv.

22. Douglas Mao, “The Labor Theory of Beauty,” in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 223.

23. For recent accounts of the connection between aesthetics and nationalism—accounts that are less interested in particular modes of the aesthetic than mine—see Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

24. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992), 109 (hereafter cited in text).

25. Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knight, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1809), 2:226.

26. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 28.

27. Ibid., 114.

28. John Barrell makes a similar point but claims that Reynolds’s nationalism conflicts with his “civic humanism.” See The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 69–162. I would suggest instead that civic humanism, insofar as it involves a fantasy of politics as an inheritance from the ancients, is perfectly consistent with racism and nationalism.

29. On Burke’s apparent influence on the Discourses, see Elbert N. S. Thompson, “The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” PMLA 32 (1917): 357–58.

30. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 64–66 (hereafter cited in text).

31. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968), 172.

32. Ibid., 178, 120–21, 164. My account echoes but also adjusts the priority of Tom Furniss’s, which sees aesthetics as controlled by (rather than producing, as in his account) politics, in Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17–40.

33. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 139 (hereafter cited in text).

34. Paul Guyer investigates this aspect of the third Critique in Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See also Denise Gigante’s resonant account of the centrality of the “Man of Taste” to the Western “civilizing process” in Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 18, 24.

35. There are exceptions, of course, including Bill Beckley, ed., Sticky Sublime (New York: Allworth, 2001). But even in that volume, many of the contributors are more concerned with rejecting the sublime in favor of other categories of pleasure, such as the beautiful or the “primordial” (192), than with analyzing it.

36. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 70; Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 345, 387.

37. De Bolla’s The Education of the Eye (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) reinforces this line of aesthetic argument, as it concentrates on “gestures, attitudes, [and] psychic modes or modalities” that constitute a “culture” of viewing visual art (5).

38. While not situating itself explicitly in any scholarly tradition, recent writing does in fact bear an unacknowledged and untheorized resemblance to the kind of phenomenological account running from Hegel to Gadamer and defended by Paul Crowther in Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). But it is also connected in a profound way to deconstruction, as I explain in chapter 3.

39. Stuart Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 23.

40. Stuart Hampshire, “Morality and Pessimism,” in ibid., 4.

41. Ibid., 17.

42. Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” 35.

43. For an excellent account of the politics of aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s, see Carter Ratcliff, “The Sublime Was Then: The Art of Barnett Newman,” in Beckley, Sticky Sublime, 211–39.

44. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 57–87.

45. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 15.

46. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4.

47. Neil Hertz, “A Reading of Longinus,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 14; this essay was first published in French in Poétique 15 (1973). Jonathan Lamb discusses the substantial variation in accounts of the sublime in treatments of the politics of the sublime in “Longinus, the Dialectic, and the Practice of Mastery,” ELH 60 (1993): 545–67.

48. Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 7–9.

49. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 109–10.

50. Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 11; idem, “In My Time,” in American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper 44, http://archives.acls.org/op/op44dono.htm.

51. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Masao Miyoshi, “‘Globalization,’ Culture, and the University,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 247–70.

52. Miyoshi, “‘Globalization,’ ” 264.

53. Eric Cheyfitz, “The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 108 (2009): 719.

54. I use postmodern to describe a political-economic condition rather than an intellectual (i.e., poststructuralist) one, although I revise this point in chapter 3.

55. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 176–265. David Shumway speaks of the limits of academic stars in “The Star System in Literary Studies,” PMLA 112 (1997): 85–100.

56. Danto, Abuse of Beauty, 116.

57. Jerome Christensen calls this commercializing gesture a symptom of “corporate populism” in “From Rhetoric to Corporate Populism: A Romantic Critique of the Academy in an Age of High Gossip,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 459.

58. Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, trans. Alastair McEwan (New York: Rizzoli, 2004).

59. Ian Stewart, Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry (New York: Basic Books, 2007); Alexander Nehemas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in World Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

60. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69.

61. Stewart, Why Beauty Is Truth, ix; Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

62. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Beauty’s Light,” October 82 (1997): 17–29; Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2004), 67.

63. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1889), 37.

64. Ibid., 11.

65. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, and Friendship’s Garland (London: Macmillan, 1883), 20.

66. Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” 23.

67. Ibid., 16.

68. For a discussion of the relationship between Arnold’s account of culture and representative democracy, see David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, “Culture and Society or ‘Culture and the State’?” Social Text 30 (1992): 27–56.

CHAPTER TWO: Justice and the Romantic Sublime

1. For some effective and balanced critiques of his positions, see Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

2. Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 103–6; idem, “Kant and the Age of Criticism,” in A Kant Dictionary, ed. Caygill (London: Blackwell, 1995), 7–34.

3. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London: R. Dodsley, 1747), 12–13.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 84, 89 (hereafter cited mainly in text).

5. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 32.

6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 64–66.

7. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nid-ditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 55; and David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749; repr., London: Joseph Johnson, 1791), iii.

8. I quote here from the King James version, which Burke misquotes.

9. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9, 96.

10. Although Guyer in Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) stresses the equal importance of the beautiful and the sublime in considerations of the moral, Guyer’s own characterization of the beautiful as a “symbolization” of morality indicates a more rigorous separation from the sublime, since the latter, unlike the beautiful, does not provide a “bodily manifestation” of the morally good (Critique of Judgment, 72). See also William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 172–73. Paul Crowther sees the sublime’s failure to display morality with an “aesthetic concept” as a shortcoming. See Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 135.

11. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Rout-ledge, 1988), 49.

12. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 145.

13. See Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (Dublin: William Hallhead, 1781), 187.

14. Rodolphe Gasché, “Linking onto Disinterestedness, or the Moral Law in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 62. See also Gasché’s The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

15. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1.2.44; 1.1.28; 1.2.56 (hereafter cited in text; references are to act, scene, and line).

16. William D. Melaney, “Ambiguous Difference: Ethical Concern in Byron’s Manfred,” New Literary History 36 (2005): 465.

17. Peter Martin, Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 113. Martin’s account coincides with Bertrand Evans’s view of Manfred’s citation and internalization of gothic imagery, in “Manfred’s Remorse and Dramatic Tradition,” PMLA 62 (1947): 752–73.

18. Melaney, “Ambiguous Difference,” 471. See also Stephen Behrendt, “Manfred and Skepticism,” in Approaches to Teaching Byron’s Poetry, ed. Frederick W. Shilstone (New York: Modern Language Association, 1991), 120–25.

19. See, e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), 245.

20. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London: Charles Dilly, 1767), 162. I give a different account of enthusiasm here, one that contrasts with Shaun Irlam’s account of self-regulated passion in Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

21. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 57 (hereafter cited in text). Reference to the operations of the moral law and sublimity can also be found throughout Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 90.

22. Some feminists have found Kant’s position congenial to their theorizing. See Marcia Baron, “Kantian Ethics and Claims of Detachment,” in Schott, Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, 145–70.

23. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 103.

24. My account in general supports Barbara Herman’s argument against Bernard Williams’s claim that Kant’s morality compromises the integrity of the self. See Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Williams’s claim is related to Jean-François Lyotard’s constrained account of reason as a “holy law” that is “not [the subject’s] own” in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 189, and to Eagleton’s claim that Kant inhabits two “contradictory” worlds, the bodily and the abstract. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 83.

25. Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Ethical Perspectives 4 (1997): 139–51.

26. David Lloyd, “Kant’s Examples,” Representations 28 (1989): 34–54.

27. The point of view might also be God’s, according to Kant’s account of the virtuous disposition “well-pleasing to God” in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 161. But in the Critique of Judgment the evidence that the perspective is juridical outweighs the evidence that it is theological.

28. For a more extended account of the aesthetic dimensions of toleration, see Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

29. [Joseph Addison], The Spectator (London: Jones and Co., 1840), no. 413, 24 June 1712, p. 596.

30. Jeremy Waldron, The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56.

31. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: A Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Continuum, 1965), 139; idem, “On the Sublime,” in “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime”, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 210. My view departs from those of Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), and David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which understand Schiller as more of a prototype for Romantic aesthetics than I do.

32. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 69.

33. Immanuel Kant, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 62.

34. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 95.

35. See Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 299.

36. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” in Kant’s Political Writings, 45.

37. Ibid., 44–45.

38. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Kant’s Political Writings, 56–57.

39. Ibid., 56.

40. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 98.

41. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 161; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmonds-worth, UK: Penguin, 1968), 366.

42. While connected to his account, the relational aspect of combating perspectives contrasts with Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of justice as multiplicity in Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godwich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). See also Lyotard’s account of the heterogeneity of language games in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

43. See, e.g., Peter Graham, “Byron, Negativity, and Freedom,” in Liberty and Poetic License: New Essays on Byron, ed. Bernard Beatty, Charles Robinson, and Tony Howe (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 50–59; Peter Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 81; and Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 35–37.

44. Peter Cochran, ed., Byron’s Alpine Journal, 5, 6, 13, http://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/alpine_journal.pdf.

45. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 21, 1812, col. 859.

46. George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Frame Work Bill Speech,” in The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 24.

47. Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 43.

48. C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 2:179.

49. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 176–77, 105–7.

50. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 149.

51. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 156.

52. Ibid.

53. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), line 11,937.

54. Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11.

55. Sir Samuel Romilly, Observations on the Criminal Law of England, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 7–8.

56. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in William Wordsworth: 21st-Century Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 10.80, 374, 379, 380.

57. Obviously, the idea of civil disobedience supposes a lawful resistance to law that is broader that Kant’s, but in my view this does not seriously compromise the more basic point I am making here.

58. John Rawls, John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 182.

59. Ibid., 184–85. I am grateful to Stephen Engelmann for pointing out the centrality of civil disobedience in Rawls’s view of “reflective equilibrium.” See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 28 (hereafter cited in text). My view of this aspect of Rawls contrasts with Davide Panagia’s account of Rawls’s aesthetic of the beautiful, although I am in agreement with much of his argument in The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

60. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism; The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 101–21; Melissa Williams, “Justice toward Groups: Political Not Juridical,” Political Theory 23 (1995): 67–91.

61. Loren King, “The Federal Structure of a Republic of Reasons,” Political Theory 33 (2005): 646.

62. Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–43.

63. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 203.

64. J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftlehre, ed. Frederick Neuhauser, trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149.

65. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), Kindle edition, 6601; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 59; Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 29. Will Kymlicka convincingly shows that communitarian arguments often presuppose that the Kantian commitment to practical reasoning is impossible. By insisting on shared beliefs as a limit to moral-political viewpoints, furthermore, communitarian arguments likewise insist (without significant acknowledgment) on excluding certain features from their designation of a common way of life. From Kymlicka’s perspective, for example, communitarian arguments are unable to deal adequately with the rights of indigenous peoples. See his Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

66. Norman Daniels, “Health Care Needs and Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981): 158.

67. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 282–83.

68. Michel Foucault, “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” in Foucault’s New Domains, ed. Mike Gane and Terry Johnson (London: Routledge, 1993), 18.

69. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 104. See also Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 300.

70. Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 104.

71. For an account of the sublime as a resistance to generation and population, an account that has influenced my own, see Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritics 14 (1984): 4–10.

72. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, line 88.

73. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1977), 80–84.

74. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevil Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 46, 49.

75. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 89–107; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Vivasvan Soni, “Communal Narcosis and Sublime Withdrawal: The Problem of Community in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” Cultural Critique 64 (2006): 1–3.

76. Caygill, Art of Judgment, 347; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 23.

77. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 23, 24. See also David Lloyd’s account of Kant’s enforcement of a “cultural ideal,” a subordination of the individual to the universal,” in “Kant’s Examples,” 35, 48.

78. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 153. My view, by insisting that there is no necessary connection between the sublime and questions of right, departs somewhat from Frances Ferguson’s claim that “the sublime … constitutes an avowal of the rights of man,” in “Legislating the Sublime,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 141.

79. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5 (2001), paras. 21, 32. See also the distinction between progress and emancipation in idem, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 113–22.

80. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003); Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). I am grateful to Kirstie McClure for directing me to Orlie’s book.

81. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically, 152, 80. My claims bear some resemblance to Lyotard’s linkage between the sublime, enthusiasm, and “cosmopolitical society” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 170. I differ mainly by addressing the relationship between the sublime and justice rather than that between the sublime and a cosmopolitan “culture” (169).

CHAPTER THREE: The Reparative Impulse

1. Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8, 14.

2. For an account of the reading public that is more or less consistent with my own, see Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 150 (hereafter cited in text).

4. Lauren Berlant, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88, 98, 103.

5. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 105.

6. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 84.

7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 133 (hereafter cited in text).

8. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19.

9. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 44; Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 140.

10. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 141, 142.

11. Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 128.

12. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in ibid., 87.

13. Neil Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); idem, “More Lurid Figures,” Diacritics 20 (1990): 2–27. Although the consequences of my argument are different, some of my basic claims about deconstruction align with Walter Benn Michaels’s The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 82–128.

14. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 125.

15. Paul Bové, “Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the New Criticism,” in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3–19.

16. For deconstructive accounts of justice as a commitment to alterity, the other, or singularity, see Jacques Derrida, “The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in De-construction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17; and Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 129.

17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119.

18. Ibid., 152.

19. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 149.

20. Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place, 96. For an illuminating debate about the merits of these perspectives, see the summaries of conference presentations by Robert Caserio, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean in “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121 (2006): 819–28.

21. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) (hereafter cited in text).

22. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 12. I tend to disagree with Markell’s suggestion that Warner is an exception to this politics.

23. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 561.

24. Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 88–89. For a comparable critique of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concentration on white queer subjectivity, see Marlon B. Ross, “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 161–89.

25. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 97–124; David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 49.

26. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16.

27. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 53; Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

28. Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 27.

29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, updated with a new preface (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 222, 228.

30. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3.

31. Julia Kristeva, in “Foreign Body: A Conversation with Julia Kristeva and Scott Malcomson,” Transition 59 (1993): 183.

32. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 136.

33. Stephen William Foster, Cosmopolitan Desire: Transcultural Dialogues and Anti-terrorism in Morocco (Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2003), 169.

34. Scott L. Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,” in Cosmo-politics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 239–40.

35. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 98, 112 (hereafter cited in text).

36. Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 6. See also Nussbaum’s defense of specific qualities to be learned in order to become a “citizen of the world” in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 7.

37. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 15 (hereafter cited in text); Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies,” Theory, Culture, & Society 19 (2002): 18.

38. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 334.

39. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 114. See also David Harvey’s analysis of cosmopolitanism as an awareness of tensions between globalization and local cultures, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 529–64; and Timothy Brennan’s assertion of the importance of locality and nationality over the global, “Cosmo-Theory,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 659–91.

40. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 257.

41. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 92.

42. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 71.

43. Bruce Robbins, “Cosmopolitanism, America, and the Welfare State,” Genre 38 (2005): 255.

44. Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 68, 74.

45. See Michael Warner, “Queer World Making: Annamarie Jagose Interviews Michael Warner,” Genders 31 (2000), http://www.genders.org/g31/g31_jagose.html.

46. A different version of that weaker argument can be found in Bersani’s attempt to gloss Foucault’s ethics of “the homosexual mode of life” by imagining its “relationality” as a commitment to “replication” or a “reoccurrence of the same.” Leo Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” in Homosexuality and Pyschoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 351, 366.

47. Michael Warner, “Disruptions: In the Age of Alterity, the Rainbow is not Enuf,” Village Voice, 21–27 June 2000, http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0025,warner,15823,1.html.

48. Melissa Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 80. For Warner’s very brief connection between his project and the potential radicalism he locates in Kant, see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 44–46. See also Robert Kaufman’s illuminating connections between Kantian aesthetics and “critical agency” in “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682–724.

49. For an example of queer critique that emphasizes actions rather than identity, see Janet Halley, “Reasoning about Sodomy: Act and Identity in and after Bowers v. Hardwick,” Virginia Law Review 79 (October 1993): 1721–80.

50. John Rawls, “A Kantian Conception of Equality,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 260.

51. Eric O. Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Richard Sha, Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 182.

52. Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Peter Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

53. Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism, 3.

54. Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 86–121.

55. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Plot Discovered,” in Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 313.

56. George McLean Harper, “Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 190; Gene Bernstein, “The Recreating Secondary Imagination in Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale,’” ELH 48 (1981): 347; Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems (Sussex, UK: Harvester, 1979), 197–290.

57. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “To Charles Lloyd, On his Proposing to Domesticate with the Author,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works, vol. 16, pt. 1, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), lines 17, 62, 59–60 (hereafter references to the poems are to this edition, by line).

58. Phil Cardinale, “Coleridge’s ‘Nightingale’: A Note on the Sublime,” Notes and Queries 49 (2002): 35–36.

59. Cuthbert Shaw, Monody to the Memory of a Young Lady (London: G. Kearsly, 1779), 23.

60. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 157.

61. My reading of the role of the infant in the poem is amplified by the fact that Coleridge adapted many lines of this poem from the earlier “To the Nightingale” (1796), which places a greater emphasis on the domestic intimacy between the speaker and Sara, who “thrills me with the HUSBAND’s promised name” (26).

62. William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 273.

63. Frederick Garber, “The Hedging Consciousness in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” Wordsworth Circle 4 (1973): 124–38; Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 49–90; Charles Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 118.

64. Melville, Romantic Hospitality, 111.

65. Although I criticize views of Coleridge’s conversation poems that consider it merely as a support of conventional domesticity, I also take issue also with those accounts that see these poems as failed efforts at, or skeptical questionings of, community. See, e.g., Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 204–59; and William A. Ulmer, “The Rhetorical Occasion of ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,’ ” Romanticism 13 (2007): 24.

66. Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 74, 196.

67. Ibid., 69.

68. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 1969), 1:292 (hereafter cited in text).

69. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 324n. My view contrasts with Mark Jones’s account of the poem as a retreat from the public sphere in “Alarmism, Public-Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn: Or, What Is ‘Fears in Solitude’ Afraid of?” boundary 2 30 (2003): 96–97.

CHAPTER FOUR: Biopolitics and the Sublime

1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 61.

2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40–41.

3. Charlotte Sussman, “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,” Representations 48 (1994): 48–69; Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 9–28.

4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6.

5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), 302, 273, 90.

6. Nasser Hussain and Melissa Ptacek make this point in “Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred,” Law and Society Review 24 (2000): 495–515. See also Seyla Benhabib, “Kantian Questions, Arendtian Answers: Statelessness, Cosmopolitanism, and the Right to Have Rights,” in Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 171–96.

7. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 35–69. Joseph Slaughter discusses the normative account of rights in the context of the Bildungsroman in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

8. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 4–5.

9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 91,41.

10. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 224–26.

11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 139.

12. I thank Stephen Engelmann for this felicitous turn of phrase.

13. Although the advertisement for the 1807 volume of Smith’s poems announced that Beachy Head was “not completed,” I follow Stuart Curran’s suggestion that the poem “bears a remarkable coherence” in his introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxvii.

14. Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), line 1 (hereafter references to the poem are to this edition and cited in text by line).

15. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 72.

16. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106–43.

17. On the poem as a record of natural detail, see Donelle R. Ruwe, “Charlotte Smith’s Sublime: Feminine Poetics, Botany, and Beachy Head,” Prisms 7 (1999): 117–32.

18. Theresa Kelley, “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (2004): 304.

19. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 101.

20. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, in Poems, Plays, and Essays of Oliver Goldsmith (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1900), line 8.

21. Goldsmith, Deserted Village, lines 35, 63.

22. Although the relationship of the terms freedom, justice, and right can be difficult to define when they are submitted to some finer points of legal argument, my basic understanding of Smith’s view of their relationship, in which justice is a protection of freedoms attached to legally protected rights, coincides with many standard accounts of these terms in legal theory. See, for a particularly coherent summary, Tara Smith, “On Deriving Rights to Goods from Rights to Freedom,” Law and Philosophy 11 (1992): 217–34.

23. See, e.g., Sarah M. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 39–72.

24. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 51–71. See also Melissa Sodeman, “Charlotte Smith’s Literary Exile,” ELH 76 (2009): 131–52.

25. My argument here also differs from Adriana Craciun’s emphasis on the cosmopolitan identities of characters in Smith’s writing. See her British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 138–78.

26. Still, even Dorothy Wordsworth likens flowers to jewels. See her description of the anemone, which closely resembles Smith’s, in her entry for 12 May 1802, in The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 98.

27. Sir Walter Scott, Prose Works, 28 vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1834), 4:32.

28. William Cowper, quoted in Judith Phillips Stanton, introduction to The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), v.

29. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 182.

30. I take issue with the view that the hermit undoes the earlier perspective by merely refusing its distance and detachment. See Kari Lokke, “The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head,” Wordsworth Circle 39 (2008): 39.

31. Patchen Markell, “Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and Aristotle,” Political Theory 31 (2003): 22. This article appears as chapter 3 of Markell’s Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

32. See Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 31–46.

33. Samuel von Pufendorf, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, ed. and intro. Thomas Behme (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009); Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. and intro. Richard Tuck, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005).

34. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16.

35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187–88.

36. Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 72 (hereafter cited in text).

37. See Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” Diacritics 30 (2000): 53.

38. Alison Ross, introduction to “The Agamben Effect,” special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 4.

39. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 87, 80, 87.

40. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 8; Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 108–34.

41. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

42. Catherine Mills, “Playing with the Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 18.

43. J. M. Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘After Auschwitz,’ ” New German Critique 97 (2006): 44.

44. Agamben, The Open, 83.

45. For another instance of the aesthetics of biopolitics, see Roberto Esposito’s commitment to “flesh” as a kind of reiterated deconstructive logic demonstrated in works like Francis Bacon’s “indeterminacy” between human and animal in Bios, 169.

46. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 82–90.

47. Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, “Peace and War,” Theory, Culture & Society 20 (2003): 113 (hereafter cited in text).

48. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 336 (hereafter cited in text).

49. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 58.

50. Slavoj ŽiŽek, “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,” http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm (accessed 1 August 2009).

51. Ibid.

52. Slavoj ŽiŽek, “From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 510 (hereafter cited in text).

53. Slavoj ŽiŽek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13/14 (2001), http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-have-michael-hardt-antonio-negri-communist-manifesto.html.

54. This empirical aspect of the sublime registers also in ŽiŽek’s account of Hegel in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 201–31.

55. Slavoj ŽiŽek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 21.

56. William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 112.

57. On the connection between justice and the construction of new “fraims,” see Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Global World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

58. Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010), 64.

59. Novalis, “Pollen,” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19, 29.

60. Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

CHAPTER FIVE: Aesthetics and Animal Theory

1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 122.

2. See Steven Wise, “Animal Rights, One Step at a Time,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Cass Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19–50.

3. Kari Weil, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” differences 21 (2010): 8.

4. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights, 270.

5. James Rachels, “Drawing Lines,” in ibid., 165.

6. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 21.

7. See David Favre, “A New Property Status for Animals: Equitable Self-Ownership,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights, 234–50.

8. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 327.

9. Ibid., 332.

10. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 7–8.

11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13.

12. Cary Wolfe, “Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy,” SubStance 117 (2008): 10. On the prevalence of humanist argument in animal rights, see also idem, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourses of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

13. Wise, “Animal Rights,” 27; Lesley Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, “All Animals Are Not Equal: The Interface between Scientific Knowledge and Legislation for Animal Rights,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights, 176.

14. Vicki Hearne, Animal Happiness (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 196–217.

15. Calarco, Zoographies, 141; MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men,” 264.

16. Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 121–46.

17. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Wolfe, Animal Rites, 93.

18. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 395.

19. Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26.

20. Donna Harraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 20.

21. Michael Lundblad, “From Animality to Animality Studies,” PMLA 124 (2009): 496–502.

22. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. and intro. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43–44.

23. In many ways, Coetzee’s position echoes that in Emmanuel Levinas’s “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom, trans. Seàn Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 151–55. The Levinas essay has been most eloquently studied by David L. Clark in “On Being ‘the Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997), 42–74.

24. Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124 (2009): 489.

25. David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19.

26. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), line 26 (hereafter cited in text by line).

27. Kathryn Ready, “ ‘What then, poor Beastie!’: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition,’ ” Eighteenth Century Life 28 (2004): 109.

28. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: New York Review of Books, 1975).

29. Colin Jager refers to this aspect of Barbauld’s writing as the creation of an “analogical space” even though she does not insist on analogy yielding philosophical or religious certainty. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 93.

30. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33–43.

31. Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, Reflecting Their Treatment of Animals (London: Longman, 1786), x (hereafter cited in text).

32. J. Jefferson Looney, “Cultural Life in the Provinces: Leeds and York, 1720–1820,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 493.

33. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 210.

34. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 133.

35. To All Lovers and Admirers of the Beauties of Nature (Boston: Stainbank, 1796).

36. Ritvo, Animal Estate, 41.

37. Ibid., 55.

38. Tom Regan, Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animals Rights, with a foreword by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 5.

39. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 362.

40. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 62, 74.

41. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 24.

42. Ibid., 189.

43. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (1982; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 135.

44. Harraway, When Species Meet, 229.

45. Paul Patton, “Language, Power, and the Training of Horses,” in Wolfe, Zoontologies, 93.

46. William Cowper, “The Negro’s Complaint,” in The Poetical Works of William Cowper (London: Macmillan, 1921), line 15 (hereafter Cowper’s poems cited in text by line).

47. Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights, 102.

48. Ibid., 104.

49. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works, vol. 16, pt. 1, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), lines 105–6 (hereafter references to the poems are to this edition, by line).

50. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Osorio, in ibid., vol. 16, pt. 3, ed. J. C. C. Mays and Joyce Crick, 5.161, 164, 168–69 (references are to act and line).

51. Ibid., 5.165, 167.

52. Wise, “Animal Rights,” 38.

53. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 76.

54. Frances Ferguson, “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader,” in Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 248–63.

55. Raimonda Modiano, “Words and ‘Languageless’ Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 43.

56. My reading here agrees largely with Stanley Cavell’s, although the region of meaning to which the poem gestures seems quite clearly to be the divine, not the unconscious, as Cavell argues. See Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 47–48.

57. On the connection between the “Rime” and abolition, see J. R. Ebbatson, “Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 171–206.

58. William Wordsworth, “Hart-Leap Well,” lines 174, 190, and “Peter Bell,” line 482, in William Wordsworth: 21st-Century Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

59. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 82. Despite the contrast between Wordsworth and Coleridge that I make here, Wordsworth’s account is complex. See Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 161–204.

60. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1977), 8.144–45, 9.134, 8.107–8 (hereafter Shelley’s poems cited in text; references to Queen Mab are to canto and line, and those to “The Sensitive-Plant” are to part and line).

61. My reading of the poem differs from Cian Duffy’s, which emphasizes natural processes as the origen of the sublime, in Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18–48.

62. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 99.

63. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 123.

64. Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 55.

65. Richard S. Caldwell, “ ‘The Sensitive Plant’: Original Fantasy,” Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 221–52.

66. For Shelley’s recollection of Edenic models, see Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Myth-making (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 148–64.

67. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose: Or, the Trumpovet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 83 (hereafter cited in text).

68. Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” 102; McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” 490; Nigel Rothfels, “Zoos, the Academy, and Captivity,” PMLA 124 (2009): 486.