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If, as Sigmund Freud argues, to be in culture is the same as to feel a kind of unease, a kind of discontent, then what is the specific, historically differentiated place of Romanticism in the cultural history of unease? What are the forms that discontent takes in an age of increasing, indeed unprecedented pressure on the individual, an age that, at the same time, offers a new space in which such discontent can be voiced and visions of a non-repressive existence can be sketched - in the realm of the aesthetic? Blending theory with close textual analysis, this volume offers a series of case studies that, while identifying a concrete historical moment, also point to some deep continuities between Romanticism and the society we live in today.

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Contents

Christoph Bode

Preface 7

Christoph Bode

Romanticism as a Form of Discontent 13

Nicholas Halmi

Past and Future, Discontent and Unease 87

Timothy Michael

Keats and Uneasiness 101

Katharina Pink

Romantic Discontent and its Discontents 121

Ralf Haekel

Discontent and Dialectics:
Percy Bysshe Shelley´s Laon and Cythna and The Triumph of Life 137

Katharina Rennhak

Mary Shelley´s Fictions of Cultural Discontent:
Attachments of Cruel Optimism in Frankenstein, Matilda and Lodore 157

Christoph Reinfandt

The Persistence of Romantic Discontent:
From Wordsworth´s The Prelude to Knausgaard´s My Struggle 181

Contributors 211

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