Description

That Thomas Carlyle was influential in his own lifetime and continues to be so over 130 years after his death is a proposition with which few will disagree. His role as his generation’s foremost interpreter of German thought, his distinctive rhetorical style, his approach to history via the “innumerable biographies” of great men, and his almost unparalleled record of correspondence with contemporaries both great and small, makes him a necessary figure of study in multiple fields.

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence positions Carlyle as an ideal representative figure through which to study that complex interplay between past and present most commonly referred to as influence. Approached from a theoretically ecumenical perspective by the volume's introduction and eighteen essays, influence is itself refigured through a number of complementary metaphorical frames: influence as organic inheritance; influence as aesthetic infection; influence as palimpsest; influence as mythology; influence as network; and more. Individual essays connect Carlyle with the persons and publications of Mathilde Blind, Orestes Brownson, John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Keenan, Windham Lewis, Jules Michelet, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Spencer Stanhope, John Sterling, and others.

Considered as a whole, Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence assembles a web of conceptual and intertextual connections that both challenges received understandings of influence itself and establishes a standard by which to measure future assertions of Carlyle's enduring intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Marylu Hill
List of Figures
Introduction: Carlyle's Networks of Influence
Albert D. Pionke

Section One: Oaks and Acorns
Thomas Carlyle, Orestes Brownson, and the Laboring Classes
Chris R. Vanden Bossche
Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and History: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History and Representative Men through the “Lens” of Photography
Stephanie Hicks
The Object as Symbol: Carlyle's Symbolic Lexicon and Robert Browning's Theory of the Objective Poet
Laura Clarke
Thomas Carlyle's Influence on George Meredith: Heroes and Hero-Worship in Beauchamp's Career and Lord Ormont and His Aminta
Elizabeth J. Deis
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and the Aesthetic Male Body: A Pre-Raphaelite Response to Ideas of Victorian Manliness
Madeleine Emerald Thiele
The 'Temporary Figure (Zeitbild)' of the Author in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Mathilde Blind's Tarantella: A Romance
Ulrike I. Hill

Section Two: Orders of Tradition
Shakespeare

Product details

Published Jun 20 2018
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 1
ISBN 9781683937562
Imprint Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Illustrations 9 b/w illustrations;
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Paul E. Kerry

Anthology Editor

Albert D. Pionke

Anthology Editor

Megan Dent

Contributor

Mark Allison

Contributor

Laura Beer

Contributor

Michael Bentley

Contributor

Laura H. Clarke

Contributor

Megan Dent

Contributor

Lowell T. Frye

Contributor

Stephanie Hicks

Contributor

Marylu Hill

Contributor

Ulrike I. Hill

Contributor

Ralph Jessop

Contributor

Paul E. Kerry

Contributor

Tim Sommer

Contributor

John M. Ulrich

Contributor

Kazuo Yokouchi

Contributor

Brian Young

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