Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose

Studies the afterlife of the Romantic idea of spontaneity in transatlantic modern prose in the work of William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Saul Bellow, to provide a broad-based historical enquiry into what it means to read, write, and live as a modern person.

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This study analyzes post-Romantic prose whose authors--in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and more--occupy a range of subject-positions. Unlike poetry, modern literary prose has no rhetorical repertoire or structure (beyond those of grammar) that one could tabulate. As a result, it becomes a zone of experimentation and spontaneous creativity, as well as a means to investigate the concept of spontaneity, understood as post-secular.

Heeding separate histories and peculiar particularities, this volume reveals writers discovering their ideas as they go, in prose whose sound, rhythm, syntax, and imagery escapes the preordained. There are chapters on William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (and Hindu philosophy), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adil Jussawalla, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These writers are intelligently vexed by two transitions: first, the movement from impulse into form; and second, the overlap between literary forms and social forms. They explore the yearning for renovated societies which, expressive of our deepest selves, would also enable those selves--in times of panicked fragmentation, moral relativism, and communication imperiled--to interact as citizens.