Romanticism and Millenarianism

Romanticism and Millenarianism PDF

Author: T. Fulford

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-01-11

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0230107206

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Expectation of the millennium was widespread in English society at the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in this volume explore how exactly, this expectation shaped, and was shaped by, the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call romantic. An expanded and rehistorized canon of writers and artists is assembled, a group united by a common tendency to use figurations of the millennium to interrogate and transform the worlds in which they lived and moved. Coleridge, Cowper, Blake, and Byron are placed in new contexts created by original research into the artistic and political subcultures of radical London, into the religious sects surrounding the Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and into the cultural and political contexts of orientalism and empire.

Romanticism and Popular Magic

Romanticism and Popular Magic PDF

Author: Stephanie Elizabeth Churms

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-16

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 3030048101

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This book explores how Romanticism was shaped by practices of popular magic. It seeks to identify the place of occult activity and culture – in the form of curses, spells, future-telling, charms and protective talismans – in everyday life, together with the ways in which such practice figures, and is refigured, in literary and political discourse at a time of revolutionary upheaval. What emerges is a new perspective on literature’s material contexts in the 1790s – from the rhetorical, linguistic and visual jugglery of the revolution controversy, to John Thelwall’s occult turn during a period of autobiographical self-reinvention at the end of the decade. From Wordsworth’s deployment of popular magic as a socially and politically emancipatory agent in Lyrical Ballads, to Coleridge’s anxious engagement with superstition as a despotic system of ‘mental enslavement’, and Robert Southey’s wrestling with an (increasingly alluring) conservatism he associated with a reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism PDF

Author: Paul Cheshire

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1786948729

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This first annotated edition of William Gilbert’s enigmatic poem, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, with extended interpretative chapters informed by Gilbert’s magical and astrological writings, shows how its dark materials fed the imaginations of his friends Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, in their formative years between 1795 and 1798.

Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism

Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism PDF

Author: David Sigler

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0773597050

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Debates about gender in the British Romantic period often invoked the idea of sexual enjoyment: there was a broad cultural concern about jouissance, the all-engulfing pleasure pertaining to sexual gratification. On one hand, these debates made possible the modern psychological concept of the unconscious - since desire was seen as an uncontrollable force, the unconscious became the repository of disavowed enjoyment and the reason for sexual difference. On the other hand, the tighter regulation of sexual enjoyment made possible a vast expansion of the limits of imaginable sexuality. In Sexual Enjoyment and British Romanticism, David Sigler shows how literary writers could resist narrowing gender categories by imagining unregulated enjoyment. As some of the era's most prominent thinkers - including Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Joanna Southcott, Charlotte Dacre, Jane Austen, and Percy Bysshe Shelley - struggled to understand sexual enjoyment, they were able to devise new pleasures in a time of narrowing sexual possibilities. Placing Romantic-era literature in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism reveals the fictive structure of modern sexuality, makes visible the diversity of sexual identities from the period, and offers a new understanding of gender in British Romanticism.

Romantic Sustainability

Romantic Sustainability PDF

Author: Ben P. Robertson

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-12-24

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1498518915

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Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. Written by scholars from five continents, this international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more recently, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and John Clare. The essays examine geological formations, clouds, and landscapes as well as the posthuman and the monstrous. The essays are grouped into rough categories that start with inspiration and the imagination before moving to the varied types of consumption associated with human interaction with the natural world. Subsequent essays in the volume focus on environmental destruction, monstrous creations, and apocalypse. The common theme is sustainability, as each contributor examines Romantic ideas that intersect with ecocriticism and relates literary works to questions about race, gender, religion, and identity.

Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy

Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy PDF

Author: Orianne Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1107328543

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Convinced that the end of the world was at hand, many Romantic women writers assumed the role of the female prophet to sound the alarm before the final curtain fell. Orianne Smith argues that their prophecies were performative acts in which the prophet believed herself to be authorized by God to bring about social or religious transformation through her words. Utilizing a wealth of archival material across a wide range of historical documents, including sermons, prophecies, letters and diaries, Orianne Smith explores the work of prominent women writers - from Hester Piozzi to Ann Radcliffe, from Helen Maria Williams to Anna Barbauld and Mary Shelley - through the lens of their prophetic influence. As this book demonstrates, Romantic women writers not only thought in millenarian terms, but they did so in a way that significantly alters our current critical view of the relations between gender, genre, and literary authority in this period.

Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the Romantic Age

Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the Romantic Age PDF

Author: Deryl Davis

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-17

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1000993744

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This book explores the contexts and reception history of Robert Pollok’s religious epic The Course of Time (1827), one of the best- selling long poems of the nineteenth century, which has been almost entirely forgotten today. Widely read in the United States and across the British Empire, the poem’s combination of evangelical Calvinism, High Romanticism, and native Scottishness proved irresistible to many readers. This monograph traces the poem’s origins as a defense of Biblical authority, divine providence, and religious orthodoxy (against figures like Byron and Joseph Priestley) and explores the reasons for The Course of Time’s enormous, decades- long popularity and later precipitous decline. A close reading of the poem and an examination of its reception history offers readers important insights into the dynamic relationship between religion and wider culture in the nineteenth century, the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological argument and theodicy, and the important but often overlooked role that religion played in literary— and, particularly, Scottish— Romanticism. This work will appeal to scholars of religious history, literary history, Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Scottish literature, and nineteenth- century culture.

'Christ’s Sinful Flesh'

'Christ’s Sinful Flesh' PDF

Author: Byung Sun Lee

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-01-08

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1443855685

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Christ’s Sinful Flesh explores the life and theology of Edward Irving, a nineteenth-century Scottish preacher and theologian, focusing on his theological framework in the perspective of his understanding of Christ’s humanity. Irving is especially known for his teachings regarding the return of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, pre-millennialism, and his distinct Christology. Most scholarly interpretations of Irving have focused on particular aspects of his thought, such as his teachings on the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, his millenarianism, or his understanding of Christology. This book provides a new interpretation of Irving’s contributions to developments in nineteenth-century theology within the English-speaking world, examining the interrelationship of his theological ideas and exploring the development of them within the context of his life. The book offers a fascinating historical account of Irving’s ministry and theology, bringing in the backdrop of his theological dissident companions and contemporary Romanticism, coupled with the tension between his Presbyterianism and his desire of pursuing the truth. Christ’s Sinful Flesh shows that Irving’s theological views, including his views on the gifts of the Spirit and his millennialism, formed a coherent system, which focused on his doctrine of Christ, and more particularly on his belief that Christ had taken on a fully human nature, including the propensity to sin. Only by sharing fully in the human condition with its “sinful flesh” concerning all temptations, Irving believed, could Christ become the true reconciler of God and humanity and a true exemplar of godly living for humankind. This interesting study is a rare exception in the research of Irving, in that it shows the origin of Irving’s Christology and his methodology. Its description of Irving’s theological development in accordance with the critical moments in his life provides the reader with not only a more vivid interpretation of Irving’s life and theology, but also shows the coherence of the preacher’s theological framework.

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism PDF

Author: Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1611490707

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Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women's importance in moments of historical crisis. While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics in the early nineteenth-century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women's experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets. The book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith, and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of 18th- and 19th-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women's studies.