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Recent scholarship on the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth usually depicts him as a secular humanist during the years of his creative ascendancy. In The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805, William A. Ulmer challenges this consensus by arguing that Wordsworth never abandoned his faith in a supernatural Deity and that the poet's theism included important Christian sympathies as early as 1798. By tracing the changes in Wordsworth's religious beliefs—from the early secular period to the later Anglican period—Ulmer reconstructs the strategic indirections by which the poet's faith shapes his major poems. In readings of The Ruined Cottage, the Pedlar narrative, "Tintern Abbey," the Prosp...
This book considers Keats’s major poems as exercises in Romantic historicism. The poetry’s rich allusiveness represents Keats’s effort to reclaim the British canon for Cockney revisionism, and reveals Keats characteristically invoking the past to define his contemporary cultural politics. The book begins by discussing Keats’s Cockney traditionalism in its Regency context and then proceeds through the poet’s career in chronological order. There are chapters on history and vocation in the poet’s first volume, the failed idealism of 'Endymion', gender and audience in the Medieval Romances, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in historical context, secularism and consolation in the other great Odes, and then the two 'Hyperion' fragments, in which history ramifies beyond poetic method to become the explicit subject of inquiry. The result is a stimulating reassessment of Keats’s intellectual development and most admired poems.
In this work William Ulmer boldly advances our understanding of Shelley's concept of love by exploring eros as a figure for the poet's political and artistic aspirations. Applying a combination of deconstructive, historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches to six major poems, Ulmer follows the logic of the writing's rhetoric of love by tracing links between such elements as imagination, eros, metaphor, allegory, mirroring, repetition, death, and narcissism. Ulmer takes the mutual desire of self and antitype as a paradigm for rhetorical and social relations throughout Shelley and, in a significant departure from critical consensus, argues that his poetics were predominantly idealist. Ulmer dem...
"The Book of God manages to be at once ambitious, deliberate, and nuanced in its interconnecting conceptions of philosophy and literary criticism."—Orrin Wang, University of Maryland
Over the course of a literary career that extended from the lingering Malthusian controversies of the late eighteenth century to the brink of the Reform Act of 1832, William Hazlitt produced a remarkable body of committed radical journalism. Against the view that partisan passion undermined his aesthetic judgment and compromised his celebrated disinterestedness, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist restores politics to the center of his achievement as a critic and essayist. In doing so Kevin Gilmartin explores his constructive relationship with the early nineteenth-century popular reform movement, while acknowledging his desire to reflect critically on radical politics and express his own dou...
Attacked by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, Shelley's poetry has, over the last few decades, enjoyed a revival of critical interest. His radical politics and arrestingly original poetic strategies have been studied from a variety of perspectives - formalist, deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist and others. Of all the Romantics, Shelly has benefited most from the so-called 'theoretical revolution', as is borne out by the wide range of recent critical work represented in this volume. The 134 essays selected analyse many of Shelley's finest poems, including Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and The Triumph of Life. Michael O'Neill's informed Introduction explores the contours of this debate. Detailed headnotes to the individual essays, explanations of difficult terms, and a further reading section provide invaluable guides to the reader. This collection illuminates the enduring and contemporary significance of the work of a major poet.
The first study to offer an integral theory of love poetry, examining why it is that poetry, even more than other arts, is so consistently associated with romantic love.