âThis book carves out a distinctive and important space in the border-zone between
philosophy, literary theory, and cultural history.â
Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy,
Cardiff University
âSwiftâs remarkable [book] stands out as a highly theoretical study in at least two respects:
its engagement with figures who defined theory before the advent of the New Historicism
and its forceful re-reading of texts by Kant and Rousseau that fostered deconstruction
. . . Swiftâs study is a major intervention in what might be described either as postdeconstructive
philosophical criticism or theoretically advanced intellectual history.â
Margaret Russett, Studies in English Literature 1500â"1900
Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy proposes a radical re-visioning of Romantic literature by
developing a new insight into its philosophical importance. It challenges both a number of recent
attacks on philosophical reason, and new historicist readings of Romanticism, by arguing that
they fundamentally misinterpret what reason is in strikingly similar ways. Engaging with the
philosophical, political and literary writings of Rousseau, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft, and
with the deconstruction of Paul de Man and Gayatri Spivak, it suggests that postmodernismâs
recent assault on Enlightenment universalism, and on aesthetic autonomy, in the name of
particularity and heterogeneity underestimates the capacity of reason to orient itself towards forms
of anthropological and literary difference.
Simon Swift is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at the School of English,
University of Leeds, UK. He is author of Hannah Arendt (Routledge, 2008).
Industry Reviews
'This book offers a sizeable challenge to received ideas about the relationship between Kant's critical philosophy and those various anthropological concerns that were hitherto thought marginal...to his main philosophical project. He provides some exceptionally acute commentary not only on the tensions in Kant's project but also on the way that they have repeatedly emerged throughout its reception-history to date.
There is much illuminating commentary on the emergence of themes in the writings of Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft... Swift's book offers a strong corrective to interpretations of which take her to have subjugated feminist values and priorities to male conceptions of "enlightened" reason. Swift has clearly learned a good deal from recent developments in literary theory (New Historicist as well as deconstructionist and feminist approached) but deploys them with a keen philosophical intelligence and a well-developed sense of their various shortcomings when applied without sufficiently detailed analysis of the concepts and categories involved. Altogether this book carves out a distinctive and important place in the border-zone between philosophy, literary theory, and cultural history.' - Professor Christopher Norris, Cardiff University, UK --Sanford Lakoff
