English and Theatre Studies Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday 3 August 2016
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: John Medley Building, fourth floor linkway, The University of Melbourne
Registrations: not required
Running through Thomas De Quincey’s late Romantic writings on war is a formal opposition between digressive, emotionally-saturated anecdote, and serene Thucydidean history, a ‘treasure for eternity’, according to Thucydides’ own foundational history of the Peloponnesian war. De Quincey's readers are invited to see Thucydides’ scientific history, with its ‘stern philosophical prose’, as a proxy for the scientific progress of war in civilised society, in contrast to primitive formless anarchy. War is consequently presented as the marker and perfecter of culture and its civilised emotions. Yet this argument is repeatedly undercut in De Quincey’s digressive, melodramatic and anecdotal texts. My paper explores this fraught relationship of literary forms to emotional regimes, with a particular eye to their temporal and ideological implications in ‘modern’ war writing.
Miranda Stanyon is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London, where she specialises in Anglo-German literary and musical culture of the long eighteenth century.