Re-establishes the enduring presence and value of classical literature in the Romantic era The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age reveals the extent to which writers now called romantic venerate and use classical texts to transform lyric and narrative poetry, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race and slavery, as well as to provide models for their own literary careers and personal lives. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics--including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded as a classical language--play a major role in what becomes labeled romanticism only later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but subtle interpenetration and mutual transformation. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude in no way prompts them to abjure valuable lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from the classical authors they love. This volume disturbs categories that have become too settled. Key Features Includes in almost equal proportion British and American authors and is transatlantic in scope Moves well beyond the five canonical British romantic poets, on whom considerable work has been done concerning their relation to classical literature Includes studies of African American and women writers

Sampling from Walden, "Civil Disobedience," The Maine Woods, and Henry David Thoreau's abolitionist and nature writings, letters, and other texts, Kevin P. Van Anglen distills the intellectual's immense, creative, clever, and surprisingly progressive thought into 750 quotations, offering a concise and straightforward introduction to his profound philosophy. Addressing subjects ranging from English literature, the act of reading, and the art of love to independence, ecology, and democratic government, Thoreau was a true original writing at a time of burgeoning American exceptionalism, and his incomparable insight continues to thrill readers from all generations and backgrounds.

The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England elite to older and broader sociopolitical tensions in Yankee culture as it underwent the process of modernization. For Milton and his writings (particularly Paradise Lost) were themselves early manifestations of the continuing crisis of authority that later afflicted the dominant class and professions in Boston; and so, the Unitarian Milton, like the Milton of Emerson's lectures or Thoreau's Walden, quite naturally became the vehicle for literary attempts by these authors to resolve the ideological contradictions they had inherited from the Puritan past.