Romanticism and the Contingent Self

This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is a literary scholar and programmer, whose work considers how computing can expand the study of literature, and how literature can expand the study of computing. His work appears in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Frontiers in AI and Robotics, the John Clare Society Journal, and elsewhere. Romanticism and the Contingent Self is his first book.