0521810981.Cambridge.University.Press.Knowledge.and.Indifference.in.English.Romantic.Prose.Mar.2003.pdf

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
KNOWLEDGE AND INDIFFERENCE IN
ENGLISH ROMANTIC PROSE
This ambitious study sheds new light on the way in which the
English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge,
particularly as they inherited them from the philosopher David
Hume. plained that the failure of philosophy in the
eighteenth century to answer empirical scepticism had produced
a culture of ‘indifferentism’. Tim Milnes explores the way in which
Romantic writers extended this epistemic indifference through their
resistance to argumentation, and finds that it exists in a perpet-
ual state of tension with pulsion to know. This tension is
most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works
such as Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt’s Essay on the
Principles of Human Action and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Milnes
argues that it is in their oscillation between knowledge and indiffer-
ence that the Romantics prefigure the ambivalent negotiations of
modern post-analytic philosophy.
 is Lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh.
He has published articles in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Compar-
ative Literature, Studies in Romanticism and European Romantic Review.

General editors
Professor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler
University of Oxford University of Chicago
Editorial board
John Barrell, University of York
Paul Hamilton, University of London
Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge
h Johnston, Indiana University
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
David Simpson, University of California, Davis
This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging
fields within English literary studies. From the early s to the early s
a formidable array of talented men and women took to position,
not just in poetry, which some of