Romantic Theory

<p>Winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize given by the International Conference on Romanticism</p><p>This original study explores the new idea of theory that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Leon Chai sees in the Romantic age a significant movement across several broad fields of intellectual endeavor from theoretical concepts to an attempt to understand how they arise. He contends that this movement led to a spatial treatment of concepts the primacy of development over concepts and the creation of metatheory or the formal analysis of theory. </p><p>Chai begins with P. B. Shelley on the need for conceptual framework or theory. He then considers how Friedrich Wolf and Friedrich Schlegel shift from a preoccupation with antiquity to a heightened self-awareness of Romantic nostalgia for that lost past. He finds a similar reflexivity in Napoleon's battle plan at Jena and subsequently in Hegel's move from substance to subject. Chai then turns to the sciences: Xavier Bichat's rejection of the idea of a unitary vital principle for life as process; the chemical theory of matter developed by Humphry Davy; and the work of Évariste Galois whose proof of the solvability of equations using radicals ushered in the age of metatheory. </p><p>Chai concludes with reactions to theory: Coleridge's proposal of the conflict between reason and understanding as a model of theory Mary Shelley's effort to replace theory with a different kind of relationship to external others and Hölderlin's reflection on the limits of representation and the possibility of fulfillment beyond it. </p>