Thomas Carlyle "Sartor Resartus" (sitemap) (original) (raw)
Matters of Genre and Style
- Questions of genre
- Carlyle's self-consciousness about autobiographical intention and generic form
- Autobiography in Sartor essentially hermeneutic rather than narrative
- Intentional disjunction between traditional narrative form and philosophical content
- The radical style of Sartor
- Tension between Teufelsdröckh and his Editor
- Circling — the fundamental structure of Sartor Resartus
- Carlyle and the Art of Persuasion
Theme and subject
- Essential to see combination of English and German Romanticism with English spiritual biography
- Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Ideas of Suicide and Will
- Teufelsdröckh's conversion
- Typological allusions the “focus of a small critical maelstrom”
Image and symbol
- Image and pattern of Exodus
- Image and pattern of the Fall
- Biblical typology
- Wilderness wandering the basic pattern of this autobiographical account
- "young mettled colt" who "breaks-off-his neck-halter"
- Ishmael
- Story of the Wandering Jew [Wandering Jew/Cain/Werther motif]
- Pisgah Sight
Literary relations — sources, influence, confluence
- Alludes to Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth]
- Major influence of Bunyan's Grace Abounding
- Differences between Bunyan and Carlyle and the development of English autobiography
- Compared to Edmund Gosse
- John Stuart Mill
- Autobiographers "accommodate" prior literary texts as they create their own
Political and social themes and Context
Visual arts
Related Material
Victorian Web Authors Thomas Carlyle Genre Mode Style
Last modified 8 February 2014