Draft:Morse Peckham

Morse Peckham For Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Morse Peckham (August 17, 1914 – September 4, 1993) was an American scholar , teacher, administrator, and cultural critic, who began his academic career teaching English Literature at Rutgers University, before securing a position in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania ¸ where he stayed from 1949 until 1967, when he accepted a position as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He remained at the University of South Carolina for the rest of his career, teaching his last course in 1980.

Peckham made his most distinguished contributions in the study of the problem of Romanticism as a movement not only in poetry, but also in architecture, scientific developments, painting, and music. Peckham judged that the “Romantic Era” was not simply a period circumscribed in the past, but was in fact a variety of attitudes and strategies for cultural transcendence that still provide the horizons for activity in the modern world. Finding the theoretical discussions in these varying fields lacking in persuasive rigor, he made it his life’s work to provide such a satisfactory theoretical grounding. His overall theoretical approach was premised on an acceptance of certain pragmatist claims (e.g. “The meaning of a sign is the response to the sign”). In the course of his work on Romanticism he also made contributions to the history of Victorian culture. In his work he found it necessary to critically engage contemporary work in semiotics. This work gave to his studies an enlarged interdisciplinary range. By the end of his career he was proposing a general theory of meaning and finally a generalized theory for human behavior (Explanation and Power: the Control of Human Behavior, 1978.)

Peckham’s theoretical contributions are often presented alongside distinctive readings of various figures associated with the Romantic movement as he sees it: the student of Goethe, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Beethoven, Scott, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Stendhal, Tennyson, Ruskin, Schumann, Rosetti, Browning, Wagner, Friedrich, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Emerson—and many others too numerous to list here—will find informative, stimulating, controversial, and insightful readings. The seemingly-effortless gliding between poetic, theoretical, scientific, musical, and painterly offerings makes for a demanding but rewarding experience.

Major Works • Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century, 1962 • • Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts, 1965 • • Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation, 1969 • • Victorian Revolutionaries: Speculations on Some Heroes of a Culture Crisis, 1970 • • Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior, 1979 • • The Birth of Romanticism: Cultural Crisis 1790-1815, 1986 • • The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays (I) 1970 • • Romanticism and Behavior: Collected Essays (II) 1976 • • Romanticism and Ideology: Collected Essays (III) 1985 • • The Romantic Virtuoso 1995 (Posthumous, ed. Leo Daugherty)

A complete bibliography of Peckham’s works is available in The Romantic Virtuoso, pp. 227-234