‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts. Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett. Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

Perspectives: Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Literature is an up-to-date explication of various popular and classic subjects and authors arranged chronologically. The book, composed of thirteen essays, examines Blake; Coleridge; Byron; Shelley; Keats; Victorian medievalism; the Victorian reaction to British India; (Ben) Jonsonian elements in Yeats; Yeats and Maud Gonne; the treatment of the Irish civil war and Irish nationalism in Yeats; and the treatment of the Spanish civil war in the selected works of modern fiction and nonfiction. Marked by an originality of approach and a freshness and simplicity, the book takes note of contemporary theoretical, interdisciplinary and cultural discourse drawn from literature, history, politics and religion as necessary. However, it is far from being unnecessarily outweighed by the loaded clichés, oft-repeated jargon and overused euphemisms of modern literary or critical theory. The result is, regardless of its specialized treatment of otherwise commonplace or well-known texts or topics, that the overall discussion is as lucid, introductory and expository as it is deep and scholarly, making the book easily accessible and understandable to non-specialist readers, in addition to specialist researchers and academics.

Oerlemans extends current eco-critical views by synthesizing a range of viewpoints from the Romantic period.

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Undoubtedly Romantic love has come to saturate our culture and is often considered to be a, or even the, major existential goal of our lives, capable of providing us with both our sense of worth and way of being in the world. The Radicalism of Romantic Love interrogates the purported radicalism of Romantic love from philosophical, cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives, exploring whether it is a subversive force capable of breaking down entrenched social, political and cultural norms and structures, or whether, in spite of its role in the fight against certain barriers, it is in fact a highly conservative impulse. Exploring both the grounds for the central place of Romantic love in contemporary lives and the meaning, extent and nature of its supposed radicalism, this volume considers love from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with attention to matters of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. With authors examining a range of questions, including the role of love in the same-sex marriage debate, polyamory and the notion of love as a political force, The Radicalism of Romantic Love illuminates a fundamental but perplexing aspect of our contemporary lives and will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the emotions and love as a social and political phenomenon.

At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

This study, published in 2000, examines the dialogue between Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, by analysing their work in relation to discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology. Writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley explored the possibilities and limits of human being, language and hope. They engaged with the work of theorisers of the human sciences - Malthus, Godwin and Burke among them. The book offers original readings of canonical works, including Lyrical Ballads, Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, to show how the Romantics internalised and transformed ideas about the imagination, perfectibility, immortality and population which so energised contemporary moral and political debates. McLane provides a defence of poetry in both Romantic and contemporary theoretical terms, reformulating the predicament of Romanticism in general and poetry in particular.