Dante Gabriel Rossetti und der romantische Desillusionismus 2

Whereas most studies see Dante Gabriel Rossetti's oeuvre as the work of a 'failed Romantic' (Stephen J. Spector) or at least a 'diminished Romantic' (David G. Riede), the present study challenges this conventional scholarly wisdom by taking a fresh look on his poems and lesser-known prose works as well as his paintings. His works are analysed against the backdrop of an often neglected but influential counter-current to the Victorian mainstream, namely Romantic Disillusionism in the line of Lord Byron. It is shown that the defining structure of Rossetti's works is the oscillation between affirmation and negation, i.e. he evokes traditional (romantic) symbols and themes, only to unmask them as wishful thinking. He emerges as an artist who wanted to hold on to the Neoplatonic and holistic world view of the Romantic poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth or Keats before him but could no longer do so because he found himself at the centre of an ever increasing vortex of doubt concerning metaphysical truths that gripped the second half of the 19th century. The study focuses on four major aspects that rehabilitate Rossetti artistically as well as intellectually: his Pyrrhonist view on the conditio humana, his inversion of the ideal of Neoplatonic and Dantesque love, his non-teleological view on history and politics, and finally his ars poetica that grappled with the question of the poet's role in a post-metaphysical world. von Forster, Felix