The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing [Paperback]

The introduction to this study should not be skipped or skimmed: It outlines the working concept that is central to Clark's ideas on the theory of inspiration. This concept is the 'space of composition' (p.15). This suggests 'some general features of the psychic transformation ascribed to inspiration, arguing that it may have the structure of a chiasmus between a scene of production and a scene of reception.' (pp.15-16). It is 'a space in which the writer must try to read not what he or she wrote but what there is to be read' (p.17). The 'space of composition' can manifest itself in terms of the response to external dicatation (as in Plato's Ion) or it may be internalized (as we see in the Romantic era). The source of the dictating or inspiring voice may be presented as God, a transednent or immanent spiriutal power, a social or political influence, the individual's asocial psyche or simply chance empirical detail in writer's environment. Clark illustrates a complex process of composition characterized by multiple forces and polyphonic voices. The 'traditional dream' of inspiration as a psychological state that 'in itself guarantees the worth of its products to others' (p.16) is, unsurprisingly, discredited and Clark works the conditions of reception - both ideal and actual - into the 'space of composition.' The writer is seen to perform a continual act of 'improvised self-reading' (p.15) that is a crucial part of the process of composition.

As Clark himself notes, 'To anyone with knowledge of the current state of literary studies, nothing sounds more trite, mystifying and even embarrassing than talk of writers as inspired' (p.1). Yet the persistence of the term and its continual re-formulation during more than three thousand years of literary history require serious critical investigation. Such an investigation has, according to Clark, been lacking in literary studies; any attention that the 'theory of inspiration' has received has come from psychology and sociology, while literary studies has been content to explode the myths of what has often been seen as an idealized concept. Clark's study aims to give the concept of inspiration a serious place in literary history, analysing the process of composition as previous studies have not.

Clark emphasizes the anxiety the concept of inspiration has evoked from its earliest articulation to the present day and links this to the idea of literary composition as a crisis in the writer's subjectivity. Inspiration 'seems always to occupy a crucial, liminal, uncomfortable and often exasperatingly mobile place in conceptions of composition: it names a space in which the distinction of self and other, agency and passivity, inner and outer, the psychic and the technical become deeply problematic' (p.283). This discomfort is seen to be exacerbated in the Romantic and post-Romantic era as writers are inceasingly distanced from the reception of their work and have less control over potential interpretations. The material and ideological gap between the literary creation and any intentional source has been widened by universal literacy, publishing conventions, market forces, globalization and the technology of textual dissemination. Clark ends the study by looking to new technologies, such as the internet, to extend this practice in a post-Romantic era that is still on-going. In this way, Clark not only answers the questions he sets out, comprehensively and convincingly, but provides scope for future investigation.