Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
by M. H. Abrams

List Price: $16.02
Our Price: $9.05
You Save: $6.97 (44%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $6.28 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

Book Review: Cracking The Romantic Code
Summary: 5 Stars

Abrams argues that from the time of the reformation, literature and philosophy were becoming more and more secular and that the western conception of the universe was becoming more and more "mechanized". In his earlier book Mirror and the Lamp Abrams traced the origins of romantic aesthetic theory and in so doing explained how the romantics reinvigorated art and philosophy by offering an "organic" view of the universe to counter the mechanistic view which made man feel less and less at home and more and more alien in his world. In Natural Supenaturalism Abrams elaborates that argument and shows in more detail just how individual romantics sought to resituate man in his universe. The "revolution" initiated by the romantics was not a political one Abrams argues but a cognitive one. True freedom is attained not en masse according to Blake and Wordsworth but in solitude where one learns to see the world as it is. For Abrams Wordsworth is the penultimate romantic(other romantic scholars find Blake to be the more important figure) because his poems offer man a route to personal salvation through a private communion with nature via the imagination. Wordsworth intentionally weds his own story to the story of mans fall from and eventual recovery of grace-- what is revolutionary is that Wordsworth suggests that man must not wait for the apocaplypse to be redeemed but can find redemption in this world and all by way of the sympathetic imagination. In the Preludes Wordsworth offers his own life story (and his own aesthetic theory) which is the story of one mans attempt to wed himself to nature and thus recover the natural affinity he felt for nature as a child albeit in a higher way with greater awareness. For Abrams it is the central story of romanticism and one that has a continuing influence on literary output. Though each romantic made use of the circular pattern, each did so in his own unique way and for scholars the real interest of the book will be in tracing the genesis and studying the particularities of each cosmogony and there are many offered here(Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche......), (Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt....).

Wordsworth placed a great emphasis on "memory"--for this was the thing that connected him to that first grace he knew in childhood-- in recovering his own version of paradise and so Abrams finds Proust to be Wordsworth's most direct heir. More generally Abrams finds that the circular pattern first found in classic mythology and the bible as well as in that first western autobiography - -St. Augustine Confessions-- continues to be a powerful model for writers as diverse as TS Eliot(Four Quartets) and DH Lawrence to name just two. Abrams finds the romantic rediscovery and revitalization of this circular pattern to be a key aspect of romanticism and the romantic legacy.

Literature & Fiction Books

• Reference