ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the power of one particularly popular discourse system, opera, to translate and stage potent ideological materials in a revolutionary age. It examines some of the philosophical problematics in any discussion of the way language works. The book focuses on one of the central assumptions of Romantic discourse, the epistemological instability of generic categories. It also examines the public humiliation and punishment of criminals in the European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a highly theatricalized spectacle, intended as social education. The book also focuses on a particular female writer and her attempt to wrestle with control of property, spiritual power, or literary traditions; on the issue of literary tradition as a discourse system operating in a particularly uneasy manner; and on the German Romantic tradition.