This new critical study showcases the cultural influence of the European Enlightenment. D.J. Moores uses a Jungian psychological approach in The Dark Enlightenment: Jung, Romanticism, and the Repressed Other to illuminate his literary subjects. Specifically, this work gestures to Romanticism's uneasy relationship with femininity, both in its treatment of women writers and the theme of the female Other.
Focusing particularly on the theme of the repressed Other in Romanticism, Moores claims that the artist speaks for all of its society and is in touch with the symbols that give expression to its deepest concerns -- that the collective unconscious speaks "through the artist." What it says in Romantic texts, according to Moores, is that the Enlightenment fractured the self through its scientism and patriarchal perspective, which created a host of Others that required recognition for the Romantics, such as evil, natural, instinctual, and female Others. In short, central to Moore's discussion of psychic imbalance in Jungian terms is "alterity," which the critic describes in terms of the "dark" Other - a kind of evil self - or as the feminine projection of self. Moores thus reiterates the popular notion that the Enlightenment was soul-crushing in its mechanistic worldview.
The work is surprising, clever and original.
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