A thematic study of some forty novels by George Sand. Well-suited for the scholar and undergraduate reader. "...a solid study. ...this work has its place in an extensive collection on an author who has captured much scholarly attention over the past 20 years." --Choice.

This book is about the paintings of Casper David Friedrich.

This book will be of great value to philosophers, gender theorists, literary critics and others engaged with the questions of life's meaning and what a deepened understanding of it looks like.

Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. In Love's Vision, Troy Jollimore offers a new way of understanding love that accommodates both of these facts, arguing that love is guided by reason even as it resists and sometimes eludes rationality. At the same time, he reconsiders love's moral status, acknowledging its moral dangers while arguing that it is, at heart, a moral phenomenon--an emotion that demands empathy and calls us away from excessive self-concern. Love is revealed as neither wholly moral nor deeply immoral, neither purely rational nor profoundly irrational. Rather, as Diotima says in Plato's Symposium, love is "something in between." Jollimore makes his case by proposing a "vision" view of love, according to which loving is a way of seeing that involves bestowing charitable attention on a loved one. This view recognizes the truth in the cliché "love is blind," but holds that love's blindness does not undermine the idea that love is guided by reason. Reasons play an important role in love even if they rest on facts that are not themselves rationally justifiable. Filled with illuminating examples from literature, Love's Vision is an original examination of a subject of vital philosophical and human concern.

In this important contribution to the poetics of fiction Dr Jay Clayton examines the way the Romantic visionary moment alters narrative structure in the novel. This study provides the first account of the relationship between Romanticism and the English novel, giving detailed attention to the formal issues of genre and representation, as well as to the social and ethical assumptions that govern apparently formal considerations. Informed by literary, psychoanalytic and narrative theory, Romantic Vision and the Novel is written in a clear and forceful style that will help many readers come to terms with these difficult subjects. Through detailed and original interpretations of works by Richardson, Austen, Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot and Lawrence, Clayton establishes the importance for what they can reveal about each other and for what their relationship reveals about the larger functional of literature in society.

Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.