Between Herder and Luther: Carlyle’s literary battles with the devil in his Jean Paul Richter essays (1827, 1827, 1830) and in Sartor Resartus (1833-34)

PR English literature

Malecka, Joanna Aleksandra ; Carruthers, Gerard

University:University of Glasgow

Department:School of Critical Studies

关键词: Thomas Carlyle, Luther, Jean Paul Richter, devil, humour, grace;   

Others  :  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4343/1/2012maleckamphil.pdf

来源: University of Glasgow

【 摘 要 】

‘Between Herder and Luther: Carlyle’s literary battles with the devil in his Jean Paul Richter essays (1827, 1827, 1830) and in Sartor Resartus (1833-34)’ examines the position allocated to the representation of the devil in Carlyle’s early religious thought. It reads the development of Carlyle’s devilish imagery as stemming from his aspiration to give a new symbolic form to the Lutheran creed. The essays on Jean Paul Richter are exemplary here of Carlyle’s imaginative depiction of Jean Paul between Herder’s and Luther’s thought thereby preparing the ground for the theological discussion in Sartor. This thesis argues for a reading of Sartor which is rooted deeply within Carlyle’s religious concerns. The central position of the devil in the text transforms it into a cleverly designed joke at the expense of the readers. The failure to recognise the devil’s textual machinations in Sartor has often resulted in a misled emphasis upon the mystical and philosophical themes which in my reading are demonstrated to be no more than alluring ‘clothes’ or masks camouflaging the text’s dramatic religious tensions. Chief among these is Sartor’s rejection of God’s grace and its substitution with Richter’s concept of humour. Jeanpaulian humour functions as a masking device which obfuscates a deep disapproval and ‘censure’ of life in Carlyle’s reformed Lutheran/Calvinist creed. This intensely negative perception of human life as irredeemably corrupted by devilish presence finds expression in the imagery of cutting, censoring, and castrating present in Richter’s texts, and echoed in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (‘Tailor Retailored’). This thesis reads the ‘German Canaan’ to which Sartor directs its readers as the demonic empire of the main hero of Carlyle’s text, Professor Teufelsdröckh, 'the Devil’s Dung’.