The Post-Romantic Predicament

'De Man's readings of Mallarmé, Yeats, and George in the 1950s demonstrate how a reflection on an authentically poetic vocation cannot help but produce a concomitant reflection on what constitutes a genuinely literary criticism and theory. It is fascinating to see how de Man's pushing of a Hegelian phenomenological method to its limits engenders what we now call de Manian rhetorical or deconstructive reading. The Post-Romantic Predicament is essential reading for anyone concerned with the question of the literary.'Andrzej Warminski, University of California, IrvineAUTHOR-APPROVEDFirst publication of a collection of critical texts from Paul de Man's Harvard University yearsFrom 1955-1961 Paul de Man was a 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'. These texts from this period include de Man's extended considerations of Stéphane Mallarmé and W.B. Yeats as well as essays on Hölderlin, Keats and Stefan George. This writing reflects recognizable 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. 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 to the present state of literary theory.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 is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His recent