Was Milton on the side of the angels or the devils? Was he republican or anti-republican, feminist or misogynist? Did he value innocence or experience? This book shows how the Romantic reader responded, in complex and often paradoxical ways, to multiple ambiguities inherent in the very language of Paradise Lost. It examines ambivalent allusions to Satan and God, in responses to the French Revolution (Coleridge and Wordsworth), in studies of the origin of evil (Godwin, Blake, the Shelleys), in accounts of the creative imagination, and it looks at how Eve pervades representations of female...

Reading, Writing, and Romanticism bridges a perceived gulf between materialist and idealist approaches to the reader. Informed by an historical awareness of Romantic hermeneutics and its later developments (as well as by an understanding of the circumstances conditioning the production and consumption of literature in this period), the book examines how readers are imagined, addressed, figured and theorized in Romantic poetry and criticism (1790-1830). Models of canon-formation, intertextuality and reader-response are considered alongside the existence of reading-coteries, the social...

Was Milton on the side of the angels or the devils? Was he republican or anti-republican, feminist or misogynist? Did he value innocence or experience? This book shows how the Romantic reader responded, in complex and often paradoxical ways, to multiple ambiguities inherent in the very language of Paradise Lost. It examines ambivalent allusions to Satan and God, in responses to the French Revolution (Coleridge and Wordsworth), in studies of the origin of evil (Godwin, Blake, the Shelleys), in accounts of the creative imagination, and it looks at how Eve pervades representations of female...

In her study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a startlingly new version of the poetic interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the critical years from 1797 to 1807. Rejecting the traditional accounts, even those given by the poets themselves, which have minimized the differences between the two, Newlyn demonstrates that it is only on the most superficial level that each poet seemed to be the other's ideal audience. Below that surface, she insists, there were radical dissimilarities between the two which led to a kind of "creative" misunderstanding by which each artist...

The unifying thrust of the book is an exploration of the tension in Coleridge's theory and practice between the Imagination and the Natural, and a delineation of the particular profile of Coleridge's imagination as compared to that of Wordsworth. There are challenging reassessments of Dejection: an Ode, Christabel and Kubla Khan, among other poems; a cluster of essays on the relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth; a strikingly original examination of Coleridge's imagination at work in the privacy of his notebooks; and an intriguing study of the neglected imagination of Mrs Coleridge. The...

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic myths of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, The Monstrous Debt argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers....

Reading, Writing, and Romanticism bridges a perceived gulf between materialist and idealist approaches to the reader. Informed by an historical awareness of Romantic hermeneutics and its later developments (as well as by an understanding of the circumstances conditioning the production and consumption of literature in this period), the book examines how readers are imagined, addressed, figured and theorized in Romantic poetry and criticism (1790-1830). Models of canon-formation, intertextuality and reader-response are considered alongside the existence of reading-coteries, the social...