Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance describes the production of a new and particular kind of postcolonial text and resituates the notion of literary influence in the context of postcolonial literatures. This book addresses the ways in which Derek Walcott, Garrett Hongo, and Jamaica Kincaid have appropriated aspects of «colonial» culture and how they deploy the tropes of British Romanticism in their own texts. Postcolonial Romanticisms argues that Walcott, Hongo, and Kincaid radically reimagine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured their island landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. The landscapes that they write about are necessarily politicized; their own subjectivities are intimately implicated in both the natural beauty as well as the traumatic history of place; they confront and engage to varying degrees the history of their postcolonial geographies, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on the individual. These postcolonial writers confront what Derek Walcott calls the «shards of an ancient pastoral», the literal and literary remains of colonial cultural authority that clutter their landscapes. Postcolonial Romanticisms is ideally suited for courses in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies, specifically courses in world literature, global literature, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary poetry, and eco-literary studies.

An investigation of literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke explores the imaginative construction of the Greek nation in light of the literary strategies and constraints of Romantic aesthetics.

Addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

In the 1790s, a close-knit group of German philosophers published several garden theory texts. These works are unique in that a close-knit group of philosophers had never before--and has not since--produced so many works on the topic of garden design. In essence, this cohort sought to imbue the most visionary concepts that had been inherited from the German garden tradition with the intellectual resources that were newly available through Kant’s critical philosophy. The most important of these concepts was the prescription for a new Mittelweg, or "middle path," garden that would mediate between the perceived excesses of French formalism and the English picturesque. In close analysis, the author demonstrates that Kant used similar "middle path" techniques in the design of his own "critical path" between dogmatism and skepticism. This similarity is most apparent when he uses topographical metaphors to describe the organizational principles of his system. By interpreting Kant’s topographical metaphors in relation to contemporary garden theories, this book offers new insights into the structural similarities between his "critical path" and the German garden’s "middle path" between French formalism and the English picturesque.

The writer's conscious awareness of the limits of his own theorizing works against the popular image of Schiller as an idealist.

Overviews of writers and works from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century, written by subject experts. Each author entry provides a detailed overview of the writer's life and works. Work entries cover a particular piece of world literature in detail.