• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.