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This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems ...
A collection examining representations of the embodied self in the writings of Milton and his contemporaries.
Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms "lonely" and "loneliness" in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclo...
This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a "long eighteenth century" that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early ei...
Neoclassical and Romantic verse cultures are often assumed to sit in an oppositional relationship to one another, with the latter amounting to a hostile reaction against the former. But there are in fact a good deal of continuities between the two movements, ones that strike at the heart of the evolution of verse forms in the period. This Element proposes that the mid-eighteenth-century poet Mark Akenside, and his hugely influential Pleasures of Imagination, represent a case study in the deep connections between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Akenside's poem offers a vital illustration of how verse was a rival to philosophy in the period, offering a new perspective on philosophic problems of appearance, or how the world 'seems to be'. What results from this is a poetic form of knowing: one that foregrounds feeling over fact, that connects Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and that Akenside called the imagination's 'pleasures'.
"Education, arts and social sciences, natural and technical sciences in the United States and Canada".
Is war the opposite of peace, or its necessary accomplice? Exploring this question in relation to eighteenth-century Britain, Andrew Lincoln opens up complex, paradoxical and enduring issues and shows how ideas and methods were developed to provide the British public with moral insulation from violence both overseas and at home.
William Poole recounts Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton’s life and preoccupations inform the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.