Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence

Edited by Paul E. Kerry; Albert D. Pionke and Megan Dent - Contributions by Mark Allison; Laura Beer; Michael Bentley; Laura H. Clarke; Elizabeth J. Deis; Megan Dent; Lowell T. Frye; Stephanie Hicks; Marylu Hill; Ulrike I. Hill; Ralph Jessop; Paul E. Kerry; Albert D. Pionke; Tim Sommer; Madeleine Emerald Thiele; John M. Ulrich; Chris R. Vanden Bossche; Kazuo Yokouchi and Brian Young

That Thomas Carlyle was influential in his own lifetime and continues to be so over 130 years after his death is a proposition with which few will disagree. His role as his generation’s foremost interpreter of German thought, his distinctive rhetorical style, his approach to history via the “innumerable biographies” of great men, and his almost unparalleled record of correspondence with contemporaries both great and small, makes him a necessary figure of study in multiple fields.

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence positions Carlyle as an ideal representative figure through which to study that complex interplay between past and present most commonly referred to as influence. Approached from a theoretically ecumenical perspective by the volume's introduction and eighteen essays, influence is itself refigured through a number of complementary metaphorical frames: influence as organic inheritance; influence as aesthetic infection; influence as palimpsest; influence as mythology; influence as network; and more. Individual essays connect Carlyle with the persons and publications of Mathilde Blind, Orestes Brownson, John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Keenan, Windham Lewis, Jules Michelet, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Spencer Stanhope, John Sterling, and others.

Considered as a whole, Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence assembles a web of conceptual and intertextual connections that both challenges received understandings of influence itself and establishes a standard by which to measure future assertions of Carlyle's enduring intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 394 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-065-5 • Hardback • June 2018 • $147.00 • (£113.00)

978-1-68393-066-2 • eBook • June 2018 • $139.50 • (£108.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence

Hardback

eBook

Summary

That Thomas Carlyle was influential in his own lifetime and continues to be so over 130 years after his death is a proposition with which few will disagree. His role as his generation’s foremost interpreter of German thought, his distinctive rhetorical style, his approach to history via the “innumerable biographies” of great men, and his almost unparalleled record of correspondence with contemporaries both great and small, makes him a necessary figure of study in multiple fields.

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence positions Carlyle as an ideal representative figure through which to study that complex interplay between past and present most commonly referred to as influence. Approached from a theoretically ecumenical perspective by the volume's introduction and eighteen essays, influence is itself refigured through a number of complementary metaphorical frames: influence as organic inheritance; influence as aesthetic infection; influence as palimpsest; influence as mythology; influence as network; and more. Individual essays connect Carlyle with the persons and publications of Mathilde Blind, Orestes Brownson, John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Keenan, Windham Lewis, Jules Michelet, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Spencer Stanhope, John Sterling, and others.

Considered as a whole, Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence assembles a web of conceptual and intertextual connections that both challenges received understandings of influence itself and establishes a standard by which to measure future assertions of Carlyle's enduring intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 394 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-065-5 • Hardback • June 2018 • $147.00 • (£113.00)

978-1-68393-066-2 • eBook • June 2018 • $139.50 • (£108.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

Author

Megan Dent completed her Oxford DPhil, “Disraeli and Religion” in 2016.

Paul Kerry is a supernumerary research and teaching fellow at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute and visiting fellow in the Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought. He is an associate professor of History at Brigham Young University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Albert D. Pionke is professor of English at the University of Alabama.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Marylu Hill
List of Figures
Introduction: Carlyle’s Networks of Influence
Albert D. Pionke

Section One: Oaks and Acorns
Thomas Carlyle, Orestes Brownson, and the Laboring Classes
Chris R. Vanden Bossche
Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and History: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History and Representative Men through the “Lens” of Photography
Stephanie Hicks
The Object as Symbol: Carlyle's Symbolic Lexicon and Robert Browning’s Theory of the Objective Poet
Laura Clarke
Thomas Carlyle’s Influence on George Meredith: Heroes and Hero-Worship in Beauchamp’s Career and Lord Ormont and His Aminta
Elizabeth J. Deis
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and the Aesthetic Male Body: A Pre-Raphaelite Response to Ideas of Victorian Manliness
Madeleine Emerald Thiele
The ‘Temporary Figure (Zeitbild)’ of the Author in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Mathilde Blind’s Tarantella: A Romance
Ulrike I. Hill

Section Two: Orders of Tradition
Shakespearean Negotiations: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Ambiguities of Transatlantic Influence
Tim Sommer
On Pilgrimage’s Form in Modern Times: Narrative Propulsion, Bodily Spaces, and Contested Spiritual Landscapes in Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling
Laura Judd Beer
Subverting Modernity in Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” and Past and Present
Ralph Jessop
The Counter–Enlightenments of Thomas Carlyle
B. W. Young
“Conditioning” as Influence: the Via Goethe and Case of Carlyle
Paul E. Kerry
“The mysteries of predisposition”: Carlyle, Disraeli, Goethe, and Religious Influence
Megan Dent
Carlyle in Comparative Perspective
Michael Bentley

Section Three: Reputational Networks
The Mustard Seed of British Socialism: Carlyle, Robert Owen, and “Infallible Influence”
Mark Allison
Influence as Palimpsest: Carlyle, Mill, Sterling
Albert D. Pionke
G. K. Chesterton and the “Shaggy Old Malcontent”: Re-reading Thomas Carlyle on the Threshold of the Twentieth Century
Lowell T. Frye
Finnegans Wake as “Sartor’s Risorted” or Sartor Retold: Recovering the Hidden Carlyle in Joyce
Kazuo Yokouchi
Re–Fashioning Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, Dress Studies, and the Monstrous
John M. Ulrich

Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors

Reviews

Influence is a tricky thing. Ample evidence for this truism can be found in Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence. In an interesting and useful compilation from a variety of new and familiar voices, editors Paul E. Kerry, Albert D. Pionke, and Megan Dent have assembled eighteen essays derived from lectures given at the Oxford Research Center for the Humanities in July 2016. Organized in three sections on a wide range of topics and individuals, all of the essays, in various ways and degrees of success, reveal Thomas Carlyle’s ubiquitous presence in nineteenth-century discourse.

— Victorian Studies

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence

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