| In his 1797 essay, "Of an Early Taste for Reading," the political philosopher William Godwin announced that "Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms." Five years later, Godwin's lapsed disciple Wordsworth described "the Poet" in the following terms: "He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love." What links these two pronouncements, beyond the progressive sympathies of their authors, is their mutual concern for and assertion of "the human." In such statements there emerges the structure of a literary anthropology--a conscious conjunction of the literary and the human.;Why "literature" as a "line of demarcation" between species? Is Godwin's "literature" the same as Wordsworth's "poetry"? Why does Wordsworth think human nature requires a "defence," and how does "the poet" become its primary defender? Such questions begin to articulate the concerns of my dissertation, which addresses the predicament of "literature," "poetry," and the human sciences in England circa 1800. Just as Jerome Christensen, in "The Romantic Movement at the End of History," returns to and advances toward romanticism because it is "at the beginning of the nineteenth century ... (that) history first ended," so too I wish to return to and advance toward this discourse-object, "Poetry," which discovers itself in the so-called end of history.;Inasmuch as poets defined their project as a human project, as a species project, then moral philosophy--with its observations on, analyses of, and prospectuses for Man--necessarily presented itself as a counter-discourse, and as a perhaps worthier project. The poets I discuss clearly understood moral-philosophical discourse (whether particularized as political economy, Malthusian theory, Godwinian perfectibility, or utilitarian "calculation") to be a discourse: that is, they recognized, as Elie Halevy has argued since, that despite the many important distinctions among moral-philosophical writers and works they nevertheless pre-supposed a common discursive ground. My chapters address and allegorically re-enact particular discursive conjunctions and encounters: Wordsworth's with moral philosophy in the chapter, "Do Rustics Think?"; Mary Shelley's with Godwin, Malthus and "the human" in the chapter "Literate Species"; Percy Shelley's with Malthus and "calculation" in the chapter on Futurity; and in the final chapter, both poets' and moral-philosophers' reckonings with "immortality.". |
