Exploring how the concept of the imagination is figured in some principal texts of English Romanticism, this book convincingly argues that this figuring is a deeply ideological activity which reveals important social and political investments. By attending to the textual figures of the imagination, the book sheds critical light not only on Romanticism but on the very workings of ideology. To demonstrate his thesis, the author undertakes critical re-readings of four major Romantic authors - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats - and shows how the legacy of ideology and imagination is...

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism--from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics--this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history:...

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism--from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics--this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history:...