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It can be argued that Lyrical Ballads is the most significant book of poetry published in the last 200 years. The reason for this is that the poems and their authors have influenced the generations of poets who have flourished in their wake, even to the end of the 20th century. Wordsworth and Coleridge cannot have understood the full…
Both "irony" and "clerisy" emerge into peculiar discursive prominence during the romantic era. Irony's provenance as a rhetorical term dates back to antiquity, but its usage receives a new birth through the theorizing of Friedrich Schlegel, emerging in his writing as something rather different than the "merely" rhetorical strategy through…
Does the potential solipsism necessarily inherent in any aesthetic pleasure find a rapport, or a reciprocal production of meaning, with the empirical world? If Romanticism has a grasp upon the actual (to recall F.R. Leavis's famous indictment of Shelley) that is not merely weak, how do the actual and the pleasure of…
The essays collected in this volume of Praxis are intended to begin a dialogue that draws together the issues raised by women writers through their consciousness about gender and their tradition-inscribed relation to love. These issues work as a counter to the transcendence of love implicit in theories of the sublime. Not every area of recent…
This volume contains an interview with W.J.T. Mitchell and a gloss by Orrin N.C. Wang which may be read through and against each other, much like the structure of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner transposed into a postmodern context. The critical innovation here is to use the web in such a way that views it as more than a mere repository of…
A careful look at Shelley's early work shows that he is capable, virtually from the start, of writing polished verse in a range of stylistic registers, and that the early verse, even in its most apparently eccentric gestures--perhaps especially in these gestures--is very much a part of its own cultural habitus rather than merely being…
During the 1960s history seemed in many ways to be an apocalyptic proposition; not coincidentally, at that same time, a revitalized Romantic literature occupied a central role in literary studies in North America and Great Britain. The apocalyptic tendencies of a Romanticism based on imagination and revolution spoke vividly to a period…