Defamiliarization and the Romantic War on Habit: Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Abstract: This essay tells a critical history of Romantic defamiliarization as informed by 1790s debates over the moral and political value of habit and custom. I argue that William Godwin’s conversion of the links and chains of empiricist association into instruments of political bondage paves the way for a radical Romantic interpretation of defamiliarization as liberatory. By contrast I show that Edmund Burke, counter to his earlier assertion of habit’s aesthetic impoverishment, seeks to bolster his social defense of custom by giving it aesthetic heft. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later attempts to balance novelty and familiarity inherit the philosophical difficulties of both camps, complicating familiarity’s contested place in Romantic literature and theory.