Perspectives: Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Literature is an up-to-date explication of various popular and classic subjects and authors arranged chronologically. The book, composed of thirteen essays, examines Blake; Coleridge; Byron; Shelley; Keats; Victorian medievalism; the Victorian reaction to British India; (Ben) Jonsonian elements in Yeats; Yeats and Maud Gonne; the treatment of the Irish civil war and Irish nationalism in Yeats; and the treatment of the Spanish civil war in the selected works of modern fiction and nonfiction. Marked by an originality of approach and a freshness and simplicity, the book takes note of contemporary theoretical, interdisciplinary and cultural discourse drawn from literature, history, politics and religion as necessary. However, it is far from being unnecessarily outweighed by the loaded clichés, oft-repeated jargon and overused euphemisms of modern literary or critical theory. The result is, regardless of its specialized treatment of otherwise commonplace or well-known texts or topics, that the overall discussion is as lucid, introductory and expository as it is deep and scholarly, making the book easily accessible and understandable to non-specialist readers, in addition to specialist researchers and academics.

Undoubtedly Romantic love has come to saturate our culture and is often considered to be a, or even the, major existential goal of our lives, capable of providing us with both our sense of worth and way of being in the world. The Radicalism of Romantic Love interrogates the purported radicalism of Romantic love from philosophical, cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives, exploring whether it is a subversive force capable of breaking down entrenched social, political and cultural norms and structures, or whether, in spite of its role in the fight against certain barriers, it is in fact a highly conservative impulse. Exploring both the grounds for the central place of Romantic love in contemporary lives and the meaning, extent and nature of its supposed radicalism, this volume considers love from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with attention to matters of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. With authors examining a range of questions, including the role of love in the same-sex marriage debate, polyamory and the notion of love as a political force, The Radicalism of Romantic Love illuminates a fundamental but perplexing aspect of our contemporary lives and will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the emotions and love as a social and political phenomenon.

In this book, I present and discuss a dialectical rethinking of the concept of Romanticism. The viewpoint on the concept has undergone a significant transformation since Jerome McGann first challenged the traditional definition of Romanticism. This perspective expands the framework of the concept by generating a forum for further study on the literary canon of Romanticism. Instead of defining the concept solely on the similarities of the romantic writers, this book aims to step beyond theoretical limitations and provide an approach to the study of cultural theory which creates a continuous and evergrowing synthesis of thought.

What, and when, is British Romanticism, if seen not in island isolation but cosmopolitan integration with European Romantic literature, history and culture? The essays here range from poetry and the novel to science writing, philosophy, visual art, opera and melodrama; from France and Germany to Italy and Bosnia.

Spititual quest is at the very heart of poetry, but in the materialistic climate of the late twentieth century this has been almost forgotten, even by those claiming to be experts in interpreting literature. How does the worldview common to the main esoteric traditions of East and West correspond to the aims of such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth? In Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition, Paul Davies maintains that only in the light of the spiritual teachings of these traditions can the poetry and thinking of the Romantics be understood as they intended. This is one of the first books to connect the creative nature of poetry to the core teachings of the esoteric tradition, and thereby to bring out the true meaning of several Romantic writers whose works have been trivialized by a culture that has marginalized the spiritual and tied itself to material, historical, and social issues. The author also shows that the Romantics were the first Western poets to imagine the relationship of the self to the environment as personal encounter. In this sense the Romantics were recalling a long-held secret of the esoteric "human sciences," not inventing a new one. This book brings the deepest interests of the Romantics directly into contact with issues closest to present-day students of the spiritual traditions and holistic perspectives.