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The Frontiers of Theory

The Post-Romantic Predicament

By Paul de Man and Martin McQuillan

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£19.99

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

A collection of critical texts from Paul de Man's Harvard University years, published for the first time

These essays, brought together from the Paul de Man papers at the University of California (Irvine), make a significant contribution to the cultural history of deconstruction and the present state of literary theory. From 1955 to 1961, Paul de Man was Junior Fellow at Harvard University where he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled 'The Post-Romantic Predicament: a study in the poetry of Mallarmé and Yeats'. This dissertation is presented alongside his other texts from this period, including essays on Hölderlin, Keats and Stefan George.

This collection reflects familiar concerns for de Man: the figurative dimension of language, the borders between philosophy and literature, the ideological obfuscations of Romanticism, and the difficulties of the North American heritage of New Criticism.

Key Features
  • The first collection of texts by Paul de Man published since the posthumous Aesthetic Ideology (1997)
  • The missing link in the published de Man corpus
  • Showcases important contributions to the analysis of Romantic and Post-Romantic poetry that engaged de Man for most of his life
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; Series Editor's Preface; 'No country for old men': Paul de Man and the Post-Romantic Predicament, Martin McQuillan; Paul de Man: Essays; 1. Introduction to 'The Post-Romantic Predicament'; 2. 'Mallarmé' (1960); Part I Hérodiade; Part II Igitur; Part III Un coup de dés; 3. 'Drama and History in Yeats' (1960); 4. 'Mallarmé, George and Yeats' (c.1959); 5. 'Stefan George and Stéphane Mallarmé' (1952); 6. 'Stefan George and Friedrich Hölderlin' (1954); Appendix: Dissertation fragment on Stefan George (c.1955); De Man's Bibliography to Chapters 2 and 3; Index.
About the contributors

Paul de Man

Paul de Man (1919-83) was the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of some of the most important works of literary theory and deconstruction including Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, and Aesthetic Ideology.

Martin McQuillan

Martin McQuillan is a multi-award-winning filmmaker, journalist and writer. He is the editor of several texts by Paul de Man, including The Post-Romantic Predicament and The Paul de Man Notebooks. He teaches in the Sound/Image Cinema Lab at Falmouth University.

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