Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, Romantic Prayer shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer was much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer's historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, Romantic Prayer turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer, culminating in an explicit 'philosophy' of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist, and atheist critiques—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language traditionally conceived is becoming impossible to maintain?

Despite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love? In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.

Compelling treatment of a question pervading literature from antiquity: when is hope a good thing and when is it not?

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.

Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics’ multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Dante and Polish Writers: From Romanticism to the Present explores the phenomenon of Polish Danteism from a hermeneutic perspective. The chapters shed light on a series of “encounters” of eminent Polish writers with Dante and the Divine Comedy, resulting in original interpretations, creative reworkings, and a wealth of intertextual references testifying to a dialogue that has always been – and still is - alive, not excluding antagonism and bitter controversy. The contributors are all scholars of Polish literature with comparative expertise, teaching in Italian and Polish universities, which ensures a consistently focused point of view on the receptive context and the ways in which it is affected by the confrontation with Dante. The hermeneutic horizon ranges from the Inferno-like reading of the inhuman lands with which history abounds, to the metaphysical yearning underlying Dante’s “poetics of transhumanizing,” to recent perspectives related to the posthuman and storytelling.

The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary explores ways in which England in the Romantic period conceptualized its relation both to its constituent parts within the United Kingdom and to the larger world through discussions of dance, dancing, and dancers, and through theories of dance and performance. As a referent that both engaged and constructed the body—through physical training, anatomization, spectacle and spectatorship, pathology, parody, and sentiment—dance worked to produce an English exceptional body. Discussions of dance in fiction and periodical essays, as well as its visual representation in print culture, were important ways to theorize points of contact as England was investing itself in the world as an economic and imperial power during and after the Revolutionary period. These formulations offer dance as an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in the print culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

The negative historical judgment given to George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ amounts nowadays to a gross critical blunder, and in the last three decades the story has been firmly reinstated in Eliot’s major canon. The premise of the present book is that George Eliot’s oeuvre is a compact macrotext where themes, motifs, patterns and cultural and personal archetypes recur with variations, and that ‘The Lifted Veil’ functions as the linchpin of this oeuvre. A sequential approach to the story is authorized by the use of a mimetic enunciation that simulates a gradual ‘definition’ of events, places, and characters as they have appeared to the narrating ‘I’ in the course of time until the moment of the enunciation. Contextualizing ‘The Lifted Veil’ means placing it within Eliot’s oeuvre and against the background of Victorian mid-century fiction; in a further meaning, seeing it as intersecting various contemporary genres and subgenres, such as that of the European and American ‘literature of the veil’, that of the archetypal icon of the femme fatale, that of Wilkie Collins’s ‘dead secret’ novels. The most significant facet that critical literature on ‘The Lifted Veil’ has tended to overlook is however the encrypting of the experience of a failed religious conversion and the foreshadowing of the search for a spiritual and racial identity of Daniel Deronda, the hero of Eliot’s final novel.