The Current of Romantic Passion

by Jeffrey C. Robinson

Summary

Robinson's short essays are forays into the centre of the Romantic imagination and into current thinking on its workings. Deftly probing the ambivalence of Romantic writers on the subjects of passion and beauty, Robinson shows how this ambivalence is also central to the experience of the modern critic in Western society. Is the reader's experience of beauty in art an escape from troubling reality? Or does desire for beauty spur social criticism and reform? Does the representation of erotic passion, as a sign of social critique, exist to be transcended for disinterested spirituality? Or is such passion the very site or the struggle for individual and class rights?