Abstract
Andy McInnes looks at the interaction between discourses of infancy and discourses of the ridiculous in a selection of British and German cultural texts from the Romantic period and considers also the more recent afterlives of these discourses in contemporary writing for children. Starting from the examination of the ridiculous by the German Romantic-period aesthetician Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, McInnes considers how the ridiculous can function in Romantic writing as a corrective counterpoint to configurations of infancy rooted in the sublime, as well as to other headline Romantic ideas such as the isolated genius. This chapter takes as its case in point the English Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom McInnes reads as a philosopher responding directly to Richter’s ideas; as a writer of the ridiculous in relation to nature, society, and infancy; and as himself a figure of the ridiculous in both satirical writing from the Romantic-period and more recent fiction for children.
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Notes
- 1.
Matthew Ward, ‘Laughter, Ridicule, and Sympathetic Humor in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 57/4 (2017), pp. 725–49 (741–2).
- 2.
Christopher Stokes, Coleridge, Language, and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 10.
- 3.
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aeshetics, trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 71.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 79–80; original emphasis.
- 6.
Richter, Horn of Oberon, p. 85; original emphasis.
- 7.
Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 86–87.
- 8.
Richter, Horn of Oberon, 87.
- 9.
See, for example, Alan Vardy, ‘Coleridge on Broad Stand’ Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 61 (2012) and Simon Bainbridge, ‘Writing from “the perilous ridge”: Romanticism and the Invention of Rock Climbing’, Romanticism, 19/3 (2013), pp. 246–60.
- 10.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 841–2; original emphasis.
- 11.
Coleridge, Collected Letters, 842.
- 12.
Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 843.
- 13.
Richter, Horn of Oberon, pp. 79–80.
- 14.
Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 31.
- 15.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), vol. 1, p. 330.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 219.
- 19.
Coleridge, Notebooks vol. 1, p. 923; original emphasis.
- 20.
Robert Southey, quoted in Judith Plotz, ‘Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained: Hartley Coleridge’s Fable of Defeat’, Children’s Literature 14 (1986), pp. 133–148 (134). Plotz’s article also gives an interesting account of Hartley Coleridge’s own imaginative response to Coleridge’s ideas about children and childhood in his writing.
- 21.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 835.
- 22.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1192.
- 23.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1643; original emphasis.
- 24.
Megan O’Connor, ‘To Read a Bull: Nominalism, Commodification, and Negative Dialectics in the Biographia Literaria’, European Romantic Review, 29/6 (2018), pp. 751–768 (751).
- 25.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 1645; original emphasis.
- 26.
Kathleen Coburn, The Self Conscious Imagination: A Study of the Coleridge Notebooks in Celebration of the Bi-Centenary of His Birth 21 October 1772 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 53.
- 27.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834 text), ll. 14, 23; unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Coleridge’s poetry are from The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997).
- 28.
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), ll. 24–5.
- 29.
Coleridge ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1809), ll. 25–7.
- 30.
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 37–8.
- 31.
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 32, 30.
- 32.
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1834), ll. 44–64.
- 33.
Stokes, Coleridge, p. 58.
- 34.
Stokes, Coleridge, pp. 56–7.
- 35.
Donelle Ruwe, British Children’s Poetry in the Romantic Period: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 10.
- 36.
William Stroup, ‘The Romantic Child’ Literature Compass 1/1 (2003–2004), n. p. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00078.x; last accessed January 2020.
- 37.
Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (London: Macmillan, 2013), p. 2.
- 38.
Anna Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings, Canny Children’ in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, eds. Anna Jackson et al. (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 157–176 (158).
- 39.
Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings’, p. 159.
- 40.
Jackson, ‘Uncanny Hauntings’, p. 160.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Riddell, Goth Girl, 22.
- 43.
Riddell, Goth Girl, 27 and passim.
- 44.
Riddell, Goth Girl, p. 210.
- 45.
Riddell, Goth Girl, p. 20.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
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McInnes, A. (2020). Coleridge, the Ridiculous Child, and the Limits of Romanticism. In: Domines Veliki, M., Duffy, C. (eds) Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50429-8_6
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