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.
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
