Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism

by Lisa Low (Editor), Anthony John Harding (Editor)

Overview

Both the English Civil War and the French Revolution produced in England an outpouring of literature reflecting intense belief in the arrival of a better world, and new philosophies of the relationship between mind, language and cosmos. Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism is the first book to explore the significance of the connections between the literature of these two periods. The volume analyses Milton's influence on Romantic writers including Blake, Beckford, Wordsworth, Shelley, Radcliffe and Keats, and examines the relationships between other seventeenth-century poets - Donne, Marvell, Vaughan, Herrick, Cowley, Rochester and Dryden - and Romantic writers. Representing a wide range of theoretical approaches, and including original contributions by leading British, American and Canadian scholars, this is a provocative and challenging assessment of the relationship between two of the richest periods of British literary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521110693
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/07/2009
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Milton, the metaphysicals, and romanticism: reading the past, reflecting the present Lisa Elaine Low and Anthony John Harding; 1. The other reading transactional epic in Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth Tilottama Rajan; 2. Newton's pantocrator and Blake's recovery of Miltonic prophecy G. A. Rosso; 3. Milton's hell: William Beckford's place in the graphic and the literary tradition Elinor Shaffer; 4. How theories of Romanticism exclude women Radcliffe, Milton, and the legitimation of the gothic novel Annette Wheeler Cafarelli; 5. Wordsworth, Milton, and the inward light Nicola Zoe Trott; 6. De-fencing the poet: The political dilemma of the poet and the people in Milton's Second Defense and Shelley's Defence of Poetry Michael Chappell; 7. Keats's Marginalia in Paradise Lost Beth Lau; 8. What the mower does to the meadow: action and reflection in Wordsworth and Marvell Frederick Burwick; 9. Kidnapping the poets: the Romantics and Henry Vaughan John T. Shawcross; 10. 'Against the Stream Upwards': Coleridge's Recovery of John Donne Anthony John Harding; 11. Coleridge, Keats, Lamb and seventeenth-century drinking songs Anya Taylor; 12. Marvell, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and the (early) modern meditation poem Lisa Elaine Low.