The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon

Abstract

‘Sincerity’, as a critical concept, did not do very well in the twentieth century. The New Critics, in particular, were unimpressed with an interpretative criterion that seemed to emphasize authorial intention; to them, ‘Is the poet sincere?’ was ‘always an impertinent and illegitimate question’. 1 In philosophical terms, too, sincerity has been displaced and overshadowed since Heidegger and Sartre by the notion of authenticity, which can be applied to objects, works of art or human subjects, in the context of ontology, epistemology or aesthetics. Although elusive, authenticity has proved an effective and adaptable notion for what we recognize, in the mode of nostalgia or desire, as a free and truthful relation to the world. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.