English Romantic Poets and their Reading Audiences (PDF)

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Ruhr-University of Bochum (Faculty for Philology), language: English, abstract: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of
accelerating cultural, social, economic, and political change. The outbreak
of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the first Reform Bill in
1832 are the political cornerstones of an age that saw the promotion of
human rights and civil liberties against established systems of absolutist
governments and limited possibilities of political participation.
Democratic ideas that form the constitutional basis of modern Western
societies were developed and circulated in a highly-charged political and
cultural climate, represented, defended and contested in a bourgeois
public sphere that had only come into being as a space of rational
contestation in England in the century between the Glorious Revolution
and the French Revolution.1
In philosophy, perhaps the most far-reaching development in the
eighteenth century was the exploration of the individual psyche. John
Locke's empiricist epistemology was based on the idea that the mind of
the infant is like a tabula rasa and that there are no innate ideas or moral
principles. Instead, Locke argued, the individual's knowledge springs
from his or her own sensory perceptions. This epistemology carried with
it a serious social problem: in effect perceivers were deprived of shared
views and, isolated in their own perceptions, were cut off from the
environment that had produced their knowledge. "Equally isolated from
objects and from others, Lockian perceivers can be certain of only their
individual mental processes. [...] Certainty, knowledge, and truth become,
at best, relational."2
The problem of the individual's position in and relation to a society that
was already perceptibly fragmenting as a result of economic developments and increased social mobility was debated by philosophers
throughout the eighteenth century. David Berkeley, the Earl of
Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith all in their own ways tried to find a solution
to the empirical dilemma they had inherited from Locke and sought to
relocate the individual in a social context.3 [...]

1 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer
Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).
2 Regina Hewitt, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma (New York et al.: Peter Lang,
1990), 5f.
3 Ibid., 7-32.