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Papers by Isobel Armstrong
Oxford Literary Review, 1981
A Companion to George Eliot, 2013
The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion availab... more The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion available to George Eliot. There is expressive emotion in Eliot's novels. Eliot herself, in her “Notes on Form in Art,” affirmed that poetry, by which she included all literary production, consisted of “relations and groups of relations” that “are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it”. “Sympathy” is less likely to explain these “emotional states,” the author believes, than an understanding of Eliot's response to Spinoza. The author turns to what Eliot's translation of the Ethics would have shown her. In the Ethics Spinoza sets up both a logic and a phenomenology of the affects. There is no unconscious in Spinoza's logic. Pleasure and pain have their counterparts in love and hatred. The final section considers form and emotional states in Daniel Deronda, with a brief preface on Middlemarch.
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2013
This gathering of five essays for 19 originated in a series of seminars given at the London Semin... more This gathering of five essays for 19 originated in a series of seminars given at the London Seminar for Nineteenth-Century Studies on the theme of Space and the meanings of space in the long nineteenth century. The 'meanings' of space were necessarily expressed in the plural, for the idea of space, one of the fundamental categories of experience, has gathered prolific significance in a number of fields over the last twenty years or so, from cultural geography, philosophy, and phenomenology to the historiography of spectacle and cinema. The aim of the seminars, and of this issue of 19, was to explore the implications of the ramifying field of space studies for the long nineteenth century. Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought of space as a primordial encounter with being, and 'being is synonymous with being situated'. 1 Space is 'at the core of the subject', he wrote (p. 254). To experience a perception independent of background was inconceivable, he argued. Space is, for him, the first humanly made experience. That all space is humanly made has become increasingly a presupposition of the many inflections of space studies, but one might want to posit two forms of this being-in-space. There is the primary lived experience of daily life-our 'inherence in a world' (p. 280), as Merleau-Ponty likes to think of it; and there is the impulse to double or reproduce this 'inherence' in artefacts, writings, paintings, spectacle, and film. I have used the word 'representation' in the title to this introduction, and in one sense the secondary 'inherence' in space created by art works is a representation. But I think the intense effort to reproduce the bodily coordinates of spatial experience in different art forms, to reimagine situatedness in new ways, and to bring this mimetic mediation to new forms of awareness, is not fully portrayed by the smooth term, 'representation'.
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020
In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-centur... more In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-century stained glass.
Feminist Review, 2003
This collection of essays came out of a conference on women's poetry in 1995 and partners a volum... more This collection of essays came out of a conference on women's poetry in 1995 and partners a volume by the same editors covering 19th-century women's poetry. Seven years on, much of the work still looks interesting and in some cases adventurous. The editors look back to Roger Lonsdale's landmark Oxford anthology of 18th-century women poets, whose publication in 1989 made many poets available to modern readers for the first time. Lonsdale declared he had selected material likely to appeal to modern tastes-entirely understandable, but it leaves the tricky question of what about material that doesn't? The question 'is it any good?' is still around: how does it get tangled up with gender in the study of the 18th century which prized some kinds of writing not in favour now? Lonsdale's anthology was of poets, not poetry: how useful is biography in returning women to literary history? How far does the figure of the woman writer need to be understood in a material context?
Choice Reviews Online, 1993
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020
almost better than a translation in that first book of Middlemarch, 'Miss Brooke'. Chapter 11 con... more almost better than a translation in that first book of Middlemarch, 'Miss Brooke'. Chapter 11 condenses, in a deft paraphrase, the core principle of Hegel's Phenomenology. If Lewes gave up on that text, Eliot took it over. This brilliant paraphrase amounts to just a few words and comes at the end of a massive sentence about social change and 'subtle movement' in 'old provincial society', all elements of which find themselves 'altering with the double change of self and beholder' (p. 95, emphasis added). 5 It is this act that makes both self and other real to each other and to themselves. It means that they are not things. This is a succinct rendering of the Hegelian principle of recognition, the mutual recognition between self and other, self and beholder. Thus this Hegelian drama, the act of mutual recognition, is the genesis of psychic and social change-it is always relational: 'They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another', Hegel wrote. 6 The doubleness of this movement is crucial: one of the nineteenth-century interpreters of Hegel, James Stirling, described this core principle of recognition in The Secret of Hegel (1865) as a 'double transition' in which the
Victorian Poetry, Dec 22, 2010
... The peculiar Victorian modernity of the sonnet lay frequently in the coordinated action of si... more ... The peculiar Victorian modernity of the sonnet lay frequently in the coordinated action of sight and lightwitness William Morris' "Summer Dawn," or Michael Field's "Ebb-tide at Sundown"that satisfied a need to interrogate process and to fix transience simultaneously. ...
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2013
Victorian Poetry, 2004
... This is an anti-triumphalist reading of technology, perhaps reactivating the argument between... more ... This is an anti-triumphalist reading of technology, perhaps reactivating the argument between self and world (the binary that both Linley and Hartman ... Jason Rudy led a group who thought of form and genre in terms of a marriage between formal technique and cultural critique. ...
... Diana Godden's equanimity and promptitude when faced with sudden transatlantic e... more ... Diana Godden's equanimity and promptitude when faced with sudden transatlantic enquiries was immen-sely supportive and forebearing. ... To Mary Hamer for perceptive and rigorous reading of parts of the manuscript at crucial times, and to Laura Marcus, who not only read and ...
Victorian Studies, 2001
... that is "forced into dialogue by the expression of its (cultural and linguistic)... more ... that is "forced into dialogue by the expression of its (cultural and linguistic) opposite" (56); in ... of transpersonal lyric as well as a politics of communitarianism, and conducts her analysis of politics ... Janowitz does not seal up the lyrics of labor in a self-contained plebeian tradition. ...
Oxford Literary Review, 1981
A Companion to George Eliot, 2013
The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion availab... more The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion available to George Eliot. There is expressive emotion in Eliot's novels. Eliot herself, in her “Notes on Form in Art,” affirmed that poetry, by which she included all literary production, consisted of “relations and groups of relations” that “are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it”. “Sympathy” is less likely to explain these “emotional states,” the author believes, than an understanding of Eliot's response to Spinoza. The author turns to what Eliot's translation of the Ethics would have shown her. In the Ethics Spinoza sets up both a logic and a phenomenology of the affects. There is no unconscious in Spinoza's logic. Pleasure and pain have their counterparts in love and hatred. The final section considers form and emotional states in Daniel Deronda, with a brief preface on Middlemarch.
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2013
This gathering of five essays for 19 originated in a series of seminars given at the London Semin... more This gathering of five essays for 19 originated in a series of seminars given at the London Seminar for Nineteenth-Century Studies on the theme of Space and the meanings of space in the long nineteenth century. The 'meanings' of space were necessarily expressed in the plural, for the idea of space, one of the fundamental categories of experience, has gathered prolific significance in a number of fields over the last twenty years or so, from cultural geography, philosophy, and phenomenology to the historiography of spectacle and cinema. The aim of the seminars, and of this issue of 19, was to explore the implications of the ramifying field of space studies for the long nineteenth century. Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought of space as a primordial encounter with being, and 'being is synonymous with being situated'. 1 Space is 'at the core of the subject', he wrote (p. 254). To experience a perception independent of background was inconceivable, he argued. Space is, for him, the first humanly made experience. That all space is humanly made has become increasingly a presupposition of the many inflections of space studies, but one might want to posit two forms of this being-in-space. There is the primary lived experience of daily life-our 'inherence in a world' (p. 280), as Merleau-Ponty likes to think of it; and there is the impulse to double or reproduce this 'inherence' in artefacts, writings, paintings, spectacle, and film. I have used the word 'representation' in the title to this introduction, and in one sense the secondary 'inherence' in space created by art works is a representation. But I think the intense effort to reproduce the bodily coordinates of spatial experience in different art forms, to reimagine situatedness in new ways, and to bring this mimetic mediation to new forms of awareness, is not fully portrayed by the smooth term, 'representation'.
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020
In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-centur... more In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-century stained glass.
Feminist Review, 2003
This collection of essays came out of a conference on women's poetry in 1995 and partners a volum... more This collection of essays came out of a conference on women's poetry in 1995 and partners a volume by the same editors covering 19th-century women's poetry. Seven years on, much of the work still looks interesting and in some cases adventurous. The editors look back to Roger Lonsdale's landmark Oxford anthology of 18th-century women poets, whose publication in 1989 made many poets available to modern readers for the first time. Lonsdale declared he had selected material likely to appeal to modern tastes-entirely understandable, but it leaves the tricky question of what about material that doesn't? The question 'is it any good?' is still around: how does it get tangled up with gender in the study of the 18th century which prized some kinds of writing not in favour now? Lonsdale's anthology was of poets, not poetry: how useful is biography in returning women to literary history? How far does the figure of the woman writer need to be understood in a material context?
Choice Reviews Online, 1993
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020
almost better than a translation in that first book of Middlemarch, 'Miss Brooke'. Chapter 11 con... more almost better than a translation in that first book of Middlemarch, 'Miss Brooke'. Chapter 11 condenses, in a deft paraphrase, the core principle of Hegel's Phenomenology. If Lewes gave up on that text, Eliot took it over. This brilliant paraphrase amounts to just a few words and comes at the end of a massive sentence about social change and 'subtle movement' in 'old provincial society', all elements of which find themselves 'altering with the double change of self and beholder' (p. 95, emphasis added). 5 It is this act that makes both self and other real to each other and to themselves. It means that they are not things. This is a succinct rendering of the Hegelian principle of recognition, the mutual recognition between self and other, self and beholder. Thus this Hegelian drama, the act of mutual recognition, is the genesis of psychic and social change-it is always relational: 'They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another', Hegel wrote. 6 The doubleness of this movement is crucial: one of the nineteenth-century interpreters of Hegel, James Stirling, described this core principle of recognition in The Secret of Hegel (1865) as a 'double transition' in which the
Victorian Poetry, Dec 22, 2010
... The peculiar Victorian modernity of the sonnet lay frequently in the coordinated action of si... more ... The peculiar Victorian modernity of the sonnet lay frequently in the coordinated action of sight and lightwitness William Morris' "Summer Dawn," or Michael Field's "Ebb-tide at Sundown"that satisfied a need to interrogate process and to fix transience simultaneously. ...
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2013
Victorian Poetry, 2004
... This is an anti-triumphalist reading of technology, perhaps reactivating the argument between... more ... This is an anti-triumphalist reading of technology, perhaps reactivating the argument between self and world (the binary that both Linley and Hartman ... Jason Rudy led a group who thought of form and genre in terms of a marriage between formal technique and cultural critique. ...
... Diana Godden's equanimity and promptitude when faced with sudden transatlantic e... more ... Diana Godden's equanimity and promptitude when faced with sudden transatlantic enquiries was immen-sely supportive and forebearing. ... To Mary Hamer for perceptive and rigorous reading of parts of the manuscript at crucial times, and to Laura Marcus, who not only read and ...
Victorian Studies, 2001
... that is "forced into dialogue by the expression of its (cultural and linguistic)... more ... that is "forced into dialogue by the expression of its (cultural and linguistic) opposite" (56); in ... of transpersonal lyric as well as a politics of communitarianism, and conducts her analysis of politics ... Janowitz does not seal up the lyrics of labor in a self-contained plebeian tradition. ...