Abstract
Consideration of the literary textuality of nature might aptly commence with an Odyssean seascape which would prove seminal for European culture:
Slow sailed the weary mariners and saw,
Betwixt the green brink and the running foam,
Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest
To little harps of gold; and while they mused
Whispering to each other half in fear,
Shrill music reached them on the middle sea.
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Notes
A. A. Markley, Stateliest Measures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 53.
John Holmes, ‘The Ionian Father: Tennyson and Homer’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 9(4) (2010), 333.
Homer, The Odyssey, tr. R. Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 273.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems, ed. O. Doughty (London: Dent, 1961), 259.
W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 738.
Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. J. Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 33. Subsequently cited as DE.
Cited in Jack Lindsay, f.M.W. Turner (London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1966), 191. Turner insisted in the full title of this picture that ‘The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich’. In Modern Painters I. Ruskin confirmed that Turner ‘had himself lashed to the mast of the Ariel and for four hours rode out a gale at sea’ (The Genius of John Ruskin, ed. J. D. Rosenberg (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 10.)
Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, tr. F. D. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 109.
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 403, 404.
Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, in The Sublime, ed. S. Morley (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 67.
T. W. Adorno, ‘On an Imaginary Feuilleton’, in Notes to Literature, II, tr. S. W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 36.
Maurice Blanchot, The Sirens’ Song, tr. S. Rabinovitch (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 60.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 237.
Franz Kafka, ‘The Silence of the Sirens’, in The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. N. H. Glatzer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 431.
Paul Connorton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 69.
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© 2013 Roger Ebbatson
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Ebbatson, R. (2013). ‘The Sea-Fairies’: The Sirens and the Administered Society. In: Landscape and Literature 1830–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330444_2
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