Necessity Freedom And Transcendence In The Romantic Poets

This study traces a clear and fascinating narrative through the thought of the major British Romantic poets, from its rise in Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Shelley and Keats, to its decline with Byron.

Paradoxes of Freedom is a study of the historical and philosophical conception of liberty. Centering his argumemt upon the Romantic exaltation of freedom that followed the psychic explosion of the French Revolution, Thomas McFarland identifies freedom as one of the three chief transcendencies, along with love and religion, by which humanity orientates itself. Departing from contemplation of the significance of the revolutionary motto `live free or die', he examines the apotheosis of freedom along with its vicissitudes, and indicates, by an examination ranging from Shakespeare and Luther to the writings of Nietzsche and Wagner, both the reasons for the supreme valuation of freedom and the nature of the hindrances, in theory and in fact, that enmesh the actual realization of freedom. the book concludes with a sombre assessment of the future of freedom as an orientating transcendence.

This study examines the theme of vocation in the writing of three poets who were also priests: George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and R.S. Thomas. Although their work spans four centuries, each of these men addressed the vocational conflicts faced by all priest-poets since the Reformation. The a

It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.