Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realized objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own skeptical doubts.
Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these skeptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine hisconfidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

The Bible is full of miracles. Yet how do we make sense of them today? And where might we see miracles in our own lives? In this installment of the Hansen Lectureship series, historian and theologian Timothy Larsen considers the legacy of George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish author and minister who is best known for his pioneering fantasy literature, which influenced authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and Madeleine L'Engle. Larsen explores how, throughout his life and writings, MacDonald sought to counteract skepticism, unbelief, naturalism, and materialism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous, the supernatural, the wondrous, and the realm of the spirit. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Philosophy, art, literature, music, and politics were all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was the age of the 'Romantic revolution', when modern attitudes to political and artistic freedom were born. When we think of Romanticism, flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelley instantly spring to mind, but what about Napoleon or Hegel, Turner or Blake, Wagner or Marx? How was it that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How did it prefigure the totalitarian movements of the 20th century? Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham answer these questions and provide a unique overview of the many interlocking strands of Romanticism, focusing on the leading figures in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and America.

A bold reassessment of nineteenth-century British painter and decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones, elucidating his fundamentally radical defiance of the Victorian age Challenging the dominant characterization of Edward Burne-Jones as an escapist who withdrew from the modern world into imaginary realms of his own creation, this groundbreaking book argues that he was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the age, protesting against imperial aggression, capitalist economic inequality, and environmental destruction in the wake of the industrial revolution. Harnessing the utopian power of embodied aesthetic encounters, Burne-Jones drew inspiration from the medieval concept of dreams as visionary states of transformation. Therefore, his art functioned not as a retreat, but as a vehicle for revolutionary awakening. Often characterized as a painter, this book re-centers Burne-Jones's practice in the decorative arts, demonstrating that he consistently interrogated the boundaries of artistic media, in keeping with wider debates over the role of the arts in the nineteenth century. The first scholarly monograph solely devoted to Burne-Jones since 1973, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones offers a thorough re-examination of his work, illuminating his radical defiance of the artistic, social, and political hierarchies of nineteenth-century Britain. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

It has often been suggested that Romanticism of its very nature has affinities with religious quest and spiritual value. These new essays, written in honor of distinguished eighteenth-century and Romantic scholar John L. Mahoney, explore the intersection of Romanticism and religion. They range from broad considerations of this relationship in several Romantic writers to close readings of individual poems. The collection breaks new ground in the exploration of the role of religion in the Romantics experience and will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism and historians of nineteenth-century religion, but to anyone interested in the intellectual life of the nineteenth-century England.

An in-depth examination of William Blake's glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprints Among William Blake's (1757-1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake's technique-one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors-to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake's development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake's books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake's writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Although primarily known as an eminent historian of Russia, Nicholas Riasanovsky has been a longtime student of European Romanticism. In this book, Riasanovsky offers a refreshing and appealing new interpretation of Romanticism's goals and influence. He searches for the origins of the dazzling vision that made the great early Romantic poets in England and Germany--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel--look at the world in a new way. He stresses that Romanticism was produced only by Western Christian civilization, with its unique view of humankind's relationship to God. The Romantic's frantic and heroic striving after unreachable goals mirrors Christian beliefs in human inability to adequately address God, speak to God, or praise God. Further, Riasanovsky argues that Romantic thought had important political implications, playing a key role in the rise of nationalism in Europe. Offering a historical examination of an area often limited to literary analysis, this book gracefully makes a larger historical statement about the nature and centrality of European Romanticism.

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century's greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English Enlightenment Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), though conventionally known as a 'painter of light', returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy. In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure - one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment - Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative. Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist's paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright's deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality. In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain's most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Miles Edmund Cotman (known to his contemporaries as Edmund) was given the role of sheet anchor to a family of outstanding artists, at the centre of which was his father, the brilliant Norwich School painter John Sell Cotman. Edmund's loyalty was to be detrimental to his own artistic career, and perhaps unfairly, posterity has often dismissed him as an inferior hack artist. While he did not show the genius of his father, he did in fact produce a variety of distinguished and well-executed work. Geoffrey Searle looks at Edmund Cotman's background, the circumstances of his work, and the work itself that survives for us today.Illustrated with a representative sample of Cotman's works (including oils,watercolours and etchings), this is an important addition to the literature about the Norwich School.

The English Romantic artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was hailed as the "painter of light" for his brilliantly colored landscapes and seascapes. He drew much influence from the French painter Claude Lorrain (c. 1604/5?-1682), who was a vital force in Turner's artistic practice from his formative years until the end of his working life. So great was Claude's influence that Turner stipulated in his will that his works hang alongside Claude's in the National Gallery, London. This book examines the ways in which Turner consistently strove to confront Claude's achievement and legacy. He had encountered Claude's works in salerooms and in the collections of his aristocratic patrons, and applied what he had learned to the British countryside, producing views of the Thames valley that transform it into an idyllic pastoral scene reminiscent of the Roman Campagna. For the balance of his career, Turner continued to pit himself against Claude, paying homage even as he continually sought to go beyond the accomplishments of his master.

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: These critics "grasp the constellation" into which our "own era has formed with a definite earlier one." Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism's singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism's contemporary "redemption value" for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

A radical, lively departure from received notions about art of the Romantic period For many, the term "neoclassicism" has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late 18th century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race, and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists' alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art. Rather than rely exclusively on subsequent scholarship, the book takes up the poet John Keats (1795-1821) as a theoretical framework. Eschewing the "Golden Age" narrative, which sees J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) as the pinnacle of the period's artistic achievement, the book examines overlooked artists, such as Henry Howard (1769-1847) and John Graham Lough (1798-1876). The result is a fresh account of underappreciated works of British painting and sculpture.

The Renaissance in the 19th Century examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European critique: a commentary on and reshaping of a nineteenth-century present that is perceived as deeply problematic. The revival, located between historical nostalgia and critique of the contemporary world, swept the humanistic disciplines-history, literature, music, art, architecture, collecting. The Italian Renaissance revival marked the oeuvre of a group of figures as diverse as J.-D. Ingres and E. M. Forster, Heinrich Geymuller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H. H. Richardson and R. M. Rilke, Giosue Carducci and De Sanctis. Though some perceived the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age, a model for the present, others cast it as a negative example, contrasting the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of an ethical and political conscience. The triumphalist model had its detractors, and the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first have appeared. Through a series of essays by a group of international scholars, volume editors Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity. The essays look from within (by Italians) and from without (by foreigners, expatriates, travelers, and scholars), comparing different visions and interpretations.

Romanticism is multifaceted, and a wide range of nostalgic, emotional, and exotic concerns were expressed in such styles and movements as the Gothic Revival, Classical Revival, Orientalism, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Some movements were regional and subject-specific, such as the Hudson River School of landscape painting in the United States and the German Nazarene movement, which focused primarily on religious art in Rome. The movements range across Western Europe and include the United States. This dictionary will provide a fuller historical context for Romanticism and enable the reader to identify major trends and explore artists of the period. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on major artists of the romantic era as well as entries on related art movements, styles, aesthetic philosophies, and philosophers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic art.

How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century Europe As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers-Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna-with a close-up look at pivotal artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Theodore Gericault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters Francois-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all were joined in a newly international network, from which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged out of the ruins of the old. Crow examines how artists of this period faced dramatic circumstances, from political condemnation and difficult diplomatic missions to a catastrophic episode of climate change. Navigating ever-changing pressures, they invented creative ways of incorporating critical events and significant historical actors into fresh artistic works. Crow discusses, among many topics, David's art and influence during exile, Gericault's odyssey through outcast Rome, Ingres's drive to reconcile religious art with contemporary mentalities, the titled victors over Napoleon all sitting for portraits by Lawrence, and the campaign to restore art objects expropriated by the French from Italy, prefiguring the restitution controversies of our own time. Beautifully illustrated, Restoration explores how cataclysmic social and political transformations in nineteenth-century Europe reshaped artists' lives and careers with far-reaching consequences. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

In this new monograph, part of Phaidon's Art and Ideas series, Simon Lee, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art the University of Reading, examines the work of Delacroix within the framework of his turbulent times, as France experienced the upheavals of the Napoleonic era. Written in a lively and accessible style, and incorporating the latest scholarship on the artist, Lee provides fresh analyses into the life and times of Delacroix and uncovers the creative process behind his most famous works.

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity," "people," and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people," the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.

A fresh approach to nineteenth-century European painting; lusciously illustrated, it offers a comprehensive overview of the century's artistic innovation This extensive survey also includes biographies for each of the artists Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Epoque represents a comprehensive guide to the range of stylistically diverse genres of nineteenth-century European painting. Accessible and insightful, this exquisitely illustrated volume presents the historical context behind the century's essential artistic movements including Romantic Painting, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Realist Painting, Academic Painting, and Impressionist Painting. Influenced by an overwhelming wave of political, military and social change, nineteenth-century Europe represented an era more diverse in painterly subjects and styles than any before it. Indeed, it was a period that saw many European painters moving away from the strictures of the academy system, choosing instead to use their training to develop new techniques and traditions. A collection of independent stories, this book also outlines the unique progression between the different movements, exciting and enlightening the reader about the most magnificent period of art the world has ever known. Contents: Foreword; Dr. Vern G. Swanson; Introduction; Author's Note; STYLES: The Barbizon School; Romantic Painting; Orientalist Painting; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Realist Painting; Academic Painting; Impressionist Painting; The Newlyn School; Post-Impressionist Painting; SUBJECTS: Landscape Painting; Venetian View Painting; Maritime Painting; Sporting Painting; Animal Painting; Genre Painting; Cardinal Painting; Costume Painting; British Neoclassical Revival Painting; Belle Epoque Painting; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography. Considered one of the world's foremost experts on 18th- and 19th-century European and American antiques, fine art and jewelry, Bill Rau has worked in his family-owned gallery, M.S Rau Antiques, for over 30 years. An avid collector and authority in his field, Bill has helped place several items in museums around the world. In addition to being a prominent member of many local business organizations, he was the youngest senior member ever accepted to the American Society of Appraisers. In addition to writing numerous articles published in a wide variety of national magazines and antique journals.

A richly illustrated, comprehensive introduction to the visionary British artist William Blake Celebrated for his boundless imagination and unique vision, William Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most striking and distinctive imagery in art, often combining his poetry and visual images on the page through innovative graphic techniques. He has proven an enduring inspiration to artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide and a fascinating enigma to generations of admirers. Featuring over 130 color images, this catalogue brings together many of Blake’s most iconic works. Organized by theme, it explores Blake’s work as a professional printmaker, his roles as both painter-illustrator and poet-painter, his relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists that preceded him, and his legacy in the United States. It also examines his visionary prophetic books, including all eighteen plates of America a Prophecy.

Scottish and Irish Romanticism is the first single-author book to address the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. Murray Pittock begins by questioning the terms of his chosen title as he searches for a definition of Romanticism and for the meaning of 'national literature'. He proposes certain determining 'triggers' for the recognition of the presence of a national literature, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose works chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.
Pittock examines in turn the historiography, prejudices, and assumptions of Romantic criticism to date, and how our unexamined prejudices still stand in the way of our understanding of individual traditions and the dialogues between them. He then considers Allan Ramsay's role in song-collecting, hybridizing high cultural genres with broadside forms, creating in synthetic Scots a 'language really used by men', and promoting a domestic public sphere. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the Scottish and Irish public spheres in the later eighteenth century, together with the struggle for control over national pasts, and the development of the cults of Romance, the Picturesque and Sentiment: Macpherson, Thomson, Owenson and Moore are among the writers discussed. Chapter 5 explores the work of Robert Fergusson and his contemporaries in both Scotland and Ireland, examining questions of literary hybridity across not only national but also linguistic borders, while Chapter 6 provides a brief literary history of Burns' descent into critical neglect combined with a revaluation of his poetry in the light of the general argument of the book. Chapter 7 analyzes the complexities of the linguistic and cultural politics of the national tale in Ireland through the work of Maria Edgeworth, while the following chapter considers of Scott in relation to the national tale, Enlightenment historiography, and the European nationalities question. Chapter 9 looks at the importance of the Gothic in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, particularly in the work of James Hogg and Charles Maturin, while Chapter 10, 'Fratriotism', explores a new concept in the manner in which Scottish and Irish literary, political and military figures of the period related to Empire.

The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie offers the first collected, scholarly edition of poetical writings of one of the most celebrated women writers of the early nineteenth century. It brings together poems from a variety of sources, including three volumes of poetry assembled by the author, annual anthologies, periodicals, songs, manuscripts, fictional tales, broad sheets, separately published pamphlets, and unpublished private correspondence. The poems included cover the entire range of Opie's long career, starting with her earliest surviving works from the 1790s and extending through her last poems in 1850. The arrangement proposed for this edition gives an overall sense of Opie's development from her early experiments with short lyrics appearing in The Annual Anthology, The Cabinet, and The European Magazine to her first large-scale success with Poems and the publication of a number of song lyrics, to the longer narrative poems in The Warrior's Return to the final phase of her publishing life after officially joining the Quakers in 1825 - the appearance of Lays for the Dead, a sequence of elegies for both private and public figures. Until now, Opie has been known primarily through a few frequently anthologized poems focusing on her response to the war with France and her support of the abolition movement. The Collected Poems offers the opportunity to explore more fully the contribution made to literary culture in the period by a woman who throughout her life used poetry as the basis of affective connection with her world.

"Romanticism: A Critical Reader "is designed both as a companion and a supplement to "Blackwell's Romanticism: An Anthology ." It deals for the most part with works included in that volume while affording coverage to key elements, including fiction, beyond the anthologist's scope to include. Most of the movements and schools of thought active during the last fifteen years are represented, including feminism, new historicism, genre theory, psychoanalysis, and deconstructionalism. The reader provides thus a progress report, useful to anyone interested in the application of theoretical ideas to literary texts, giving a unique overview of Romantic studies since 1980.