Uncanny echoes

pp. 1-31

in: Giles Whiteley, Schelling's reception in nineteenth-century British literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Freud's famous theory of the uncanny rests in part on a quotation from Schelling. This chapter suggests that this partial and diffuse response to Schelling offers both a model and metaphor to help us understand the ways in which the reception of Schelling in nineteenth century British literature may be considered an "uncanny" one. For Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, considering the "coincidences' of his own thought with Schelling's, the experience of reading Schelling is uncanny, but through comparing his rhetorical strategies with those used by Freud when discussing similar kinds of coincidences between psychoanalysis and philosophy, Coleridge's argument is seen to deconstruct itself. The chapter concludes by considering the methodological problems which face any attempt to write the history of Schelling's nineteenth century British reception.