Post Romantic Predicament

A collection of critical texts from Paul de Man's Harvard University years, published for the first timeThese 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• With an introduction by Martin McQullian, a leading de Man scholar

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 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.