The Myth and Identity of the Romantic Artist in European Literature

This study in comparative literature contributes to the understanding of the myth of the artist as a European cultural construct and investigates the processes of personal mythmaking. The construction of romantic identity is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, insisting on the strategies employed to produce a typology of the artist

Elena Anastasaki is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies at the University of Thessaly (Greece). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Universities of Kent and Paris 8.

Acknowledgments Notes on Translation Introduction - Overview of the Background Scene - Outline of Approach, Key Concepts and Methodology - Book Structure Part One Chapter 1, Forming Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach - Ethos and the Image of the Author - Narrative and Identity Theories: Narrating the Self, an Ontological Dilemma - Identity and Aesthetics - Kant, Schiller, and Romantic Aesthetics Chapter 2, The Making of Artistic Genius - A philosophical Concept - The Figure of Chatterton - Coleridge's Chatterton: A Life-long Companion - Alfred de Vigny's Chatterton: The Emblem of a Social Cause Chapter 3, Goethe's Prometheus, Rousseau's Pygmalion, and their Progeny - "Here sit I, forming mortals / After my image": The Promethean Artist - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Prometheus" - Lord Byron, "Ode to Prometheus" - Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound - Victor Hugo, "Genius," "The grieving poem weeps" - Théophile Gautier, "On the Prometheus of Madrid" - Pygmalion and the Ontological Status of the Work of Art - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion - Thomas Lovell Beddoes, "Pygmalion, or the Cyprian Statuary" Part Two Chapter 4, "Now, if I know myself, I should say, that I have no character at all"-Byron's Mythmaking Strategies - The Quest for a Personal Voice - The Poet's Physical Appearance - The Poet as Pilgrim: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Poetic Ventriloquism: The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante - Byron's Public Persona Chapter 5, Percy Shelley and the Metaphysical Authenticity of the Poet - Alastor, or The Adventures of the Poetic Mind - From Aesthetic Experience to the Aesthetic Self - Adonais, or the Self from Without - Pivotal Moments of Self Awareness - From Poet to Poet: "To Wordsworth" and "Lines to __" ("Sonnet to Byron") Chapter 6, Honoré de Balzac, the Napoleon of Letters - "[L]a tête dans le ciel et les pieds sur cette terre" - Balzac's Fictional Artists - The Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man - The Artist as Martyr - Sympathetic Parody: Grotesque and Sublime Identities - The Bourgeois Artist Chapter 7, Théophile Gautier, Stylistic Identity and Poetic Time - The Negation of the Self: Les Jeunes-France - The Golden Fleece: A Quest for Rubens' Blonds, or How Art Spoils Reality - Autobiographic Sketches and the Poet as Shapeshifter Conclusion, A Sociopoetical Approach to Genius - Materialistic Representations of Genius - The Poet's Two Bodies - Napoleon - Artistic Identity as a Narrative Construct in a European Context Works Cited and Consulted