Introduction: Recovering Intellectual Love

Summary

Amorous Aesthetics is grounded in a simple observation: Romantic poets use ‘love’ in their writings far more often than ‘nature’ and ‘imagination’, yet this remains unacknowledged in Romantic scholarship. One reason is that Romanticism has been built on the pillars of nature and imagination: these two concepts attain a unique significance during the Romantic period that influences contemporary thought. From the Romantics’ nascent environmentalism to their idea of the self to their various psychological and scientific approaches to cognition, nature and imagination remain central to understanding major texts of the period. A second reason for this situation is the imprecise and often idealized meaning of love itself, which makes it more convenient to dismiss love as sentimental or as an ideological smokescreen rather than to take it seriously. An earlier tradition of criticism cast Romantic love as a predominantly ‘unifying and cohesive force’, and that notion of idealized love has proven powerfully persuasive. In his seminal 1971 study of Romantic love, Frederick Beaty argued that the Romantics sought reconciliation of the earthly and spiritual through love; love, in other words, is transcendence. Historians similarly locate in the Romantic period a revival of what Denis de Rougemont calls paganism's ‘mystical union’ of divine love, effectually spiritualizing the erotic. Jerome McGann and subsequent new historicists would later critique this characterization of love as part of the Romantic Ideology: since the 1980s, scholars generally link love to Romantic imagination and aesthetics as attempts to transcend politics and escape the material world. Romantic love, then, is typically associated with an idealized, intellectual form of love in contradistinction to a ‘realist’ tradition that sees such forms of intellectual idealism ‘as unverifiable, contrary to science, and generally false to what appears in ordinary experience’. However, as the rise of affect studies and the field of literature and science suggests, we need to take a second look at emotions, including love, in Romantic literature.

The ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences allows Amorous Aesthetics to take up this challenge by recovering the tradition of intellectual love in Romantic poetry and poetics. As we move beyond resistance to ‘emotional readings’ made suspicious by the ‘affective fallacy’, as well as the hermeneutics of suspicion championed by new historicism, we can see the notion of Romantic love anew.