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16 septembre 2021
- handle: 10670/1.oltfn6
- isbn: 9781800640719
- eisbn: 9791036573927
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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poetry history Europe nineteenth century eighteenth century philosophy literature America time British Romantic Frankenstein periodisation poetics of time ecology futurity opera atemporality Venice Literature, British Isles LIT000000 LIT004010 DS DSBSujets proches
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Matthew Redmond, « 7. Book-Time in Charles Lamb and Washington Irving », Open Book Publishers, ID : 10670/1.oltfn6
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This essay considers how two Romantic writers, Charles Lamb and Washington Irving, explore the perception-altering powers of absorbed reading. Both men, with their famously antiquarian tastes, have long been portrayed as enemies of change, retreating from the present moment into the comforting familiarity of old times. Upon our closer examination of their writing, however, that received view breaks down—for Lamb and Irving often use texts within texts to recuperate a fuller range of temporal experience than what the advent of industrialisation in a post-revolutionary world seems to allow. In Lamb’s Last Essays of Elia and Irving’s Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the image of an ideal reading practice—with all its capacity for surprise, improvisation, and leisurely enjoyment—enables us to conceptualise alternative experiences of modern life. Reading well, in other words, becomes a gateway into book-time, a reprieve (however temporary) from the inhumane workings of clock-time.