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The genesis of this collection began with seemingly simple questions the editor asked of himself (and occasionally others), and the works appearing in this volume represent answers offered by insightful and engaged colleagues: "What's going on with Buddhism during the Romantic period? Can and should academic and spiritual practices be…
In How To Do the History of Sexuality, David M. Halperin puts to rest the idea that Michel Foucault meant in the History of Sexuality to separate sexual acts from identity. According to Halperin, Foucault never intended to encourage historians of sexuality to neglect the connections between…
This collection of essays explores the relationship between Romantic Gothicism and the rise of the visual technologies centred on commercial exploitation of the magic lantern. Although grounded in the technological innovations of the Romantic and early Victorian periods – and reactions to them – the essays in the collection anticipate…
Demonstrating the widescale influence of opera upon the cultural field of the Romantic period, the essays collected in "Opera and Romanticism" aim to redress the critical neglect to which this form has been previously subjected. A lush interchange between opera and both literature and drama is examined in the essays of Christina Fuhrmann…
More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. A ghost who has never quite been laid to rest, and whose name still possesses conjuring power, de Man continues symbolically to embody an aspect of "theory" that resists easy routinization. Routinely taken to personify routinized…
In spite of the recent prevalence of historical and sociological concerns in Romantic scholarship, the aesthetic insists: indeed, its very mode is one of insistence. The essays by Balfour, Ferris, and Swann collected for this issue address the question of "Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic" by turning in various forms to…
Digital Designs on Blake brings together recent and more seasoned Blake scholars who have worked in new media. Contributors explore how new media representation of William Blake's work provides a heuristic for another mode of inquiry into Blake's complex verbal and visual texts. The volume looks at Blake's designs as well as new…
This volume on the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is part of the Romantic Circles Praxis series on seminal texts in Romantic literature. The eleven contributors were asked not for original scholarship on the "Urn," but for an account of how they teach this hypercanonic text. If it can be assumed that every English major knows something about this…
In this volume, three divergent critics—representing Romanticism, contemporary poetry, and more formal concerns, such as prosody and rhythm—present analyses of five contemporary poets viewed in relationship to several different strains of Romantic practice or theory. All three essays make creative conjectures as to what Romanticism looks…
This collection offers five outstanding Romanticists focusing on the nightmarish sleep into which Victor Frankenstein falls after seeing his creature take its first breaths in Mary Shelley's original novel of 1818. That dream, the dark side of Frankenstein's glorious daydreams about the future of humanity after his experiment, has been…