Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust

Comprehensive analysis of the work and influence of the major American literary critic and cultural theorist Geoffrey Hartman

Abbreviations \ Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma\ 1. Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature \ 2. Of Climatology: Literature after Structure \ 3. Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 4. Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss \ 5. 'Darkness makes abode': Mourning, Testimony, Community \ Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust \ Works Cited

"The remarkable story of later twentieth-century American literary criticism is only beginning to be accorded the fine-grained attention it deserves. Geoffrey Hartman is one of the major figures in that history. In this wide-ranging book, Pieter Vermeulen expertly unpacks the subtleties of Hartman's 'Wordsworthian' engagement with the disaster of modernity, demonstrating how and why Hartman's work affirms the resilience of the literary imagination within a media-saturated culture. Although certain 'scars of the spirit' never heal, Hartman's oeuvre offers us the example of a critic who hangs listening in the archive, keeping faith with loss and grief, yet attuned to past and future potentialities.'
Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust is a skilful, detailed and methodical critical approach that treats Hartman's changeability as the reason for further investigation and not an excuse for avoidance. It manages to offer another dimension and reinvigorate Hartman's work with an insightful, systematic reading that attends to agreements and disagreements.

Pieter Vermeulen is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden.