Dr Harding demonstrates in this study the importance of human relationship in Coleridge's thought and writing. The first three chapters explore Coleridge's idea of relationship as it developed throughout his creative life, and show how Coleridge's own relationships influenced his thinking about morality. One section is devoted to a fresh interpretation of Coleridge's major poetry. The final chapter traces the idea of relationship in Coleridge's social and political philosophy. Dr Harding uses previously unpublished Coleridge manuscripts in support of his analysis, and assesses the nature of Coleridge's originality as a thinker by viewing him in the context of his own time and through comparison with other writers. This evaluation of a major poet and thinker will appeal not only to those whose interests are literary, but also to students of philosophy and politics.

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.

In this important study, Anthony Harding examines the ways in which mythology was received and reinterpreted by the most prominent English Romantic poets. Although there have been studies that examined a particular author's interest in various mythic traditions, none has addressed the wider question of the contemporary reception of myth: what sources the Romantics turned to, what the influential schools of mythography were, and what roles the individual writers gave to mythology or to particular myths in their work.

In The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism, Harding deals with those questions by examining how Romantic writers understood and received myth and what they understood "the mythic" to be. He shows how the Romantics' own mythmaking drew its meaning from the contemporary political scene and contemporary ideological conflicts, rather than from a concept of myth as a timeless, unchanging source of value. Harding analyzes the uses of myth in selected texts of the period, covering the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, among others.

Including a valuable bibliography of primary and secondary sources, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism fills a major void in Romantic studies. This book will be of great benefit to specialists in English Romanticism and to anyone with a serious interest in mythology.