Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce (Suny Series on the Sublime) - Softcover

"Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce is a well-researched work of comparative literature/comparative poetics. It juxtaposes two extremely important figures from Romantic and post-Romantic European culture, Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce. Verstraete provides a provocative reading of each author's complex relationship with the Romantic idea(l) of the literary fragment. Her discussion of what she calls the 'feminine sublime' in Schlegel's Lucinde and of Joyce's 'demystification' of Schlegelian ideals in the 'Romantic' Portrait, 'modern' Ulysses, and 'postmodern' Finnegans Wake is convincing; and her claim that Joyce criticism fails to recognize its own (and Joyce's) 'conceptual foundations among the German Romantics' is well taken." -- Brian W. Shaffer, Rhodes College

"Verstraete's style has suppleness and wit and sweeps the reader along to its inevitable conclusion." -- G. Lernout, University of Antwerp