Nineteenth Century Poetry And Liberal Thought

This book explores the relationship between nineteenth-century poetry and liberal philosophy. It carries out a reassessment of the aesthetic possibilities of liberalism and it considers the variety of ways that poetry by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne responds to and participates in urgent philosophical, social and political debates about liberty and the rule of law. It provides an account of poetry’s intervention into four different sites where liberalism has a stake: the self, the university, married life and the nation state and it seeks to assert the peculiar capacity of poetry to articulate liberal concerns, proposing poetic language as a means of liberal enquiry.

In this book, Elissa Zellinger analyzes both political philosophy and poetic theory in order to chronicle the consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject across the long nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century United States, both liberalism and lyric sought self-definition by practicing techniques of exclusion. Liberalism was a political philosophy whose supposed universals were limited to white men and created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. The conventions of poetic reception only redoubled the sense that liberal selfhood defined its boundaries by refusing raced and gendered others. Yet Zellinger argues that it is precisely the poetics of the excluded that offer insights into the dynamic processes that came to form the modern liberal and lyric subjects. She examines poets—Frances Sargent Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. Pauline Johnson—whose work uses lyric practices to contest the very assumptions about selfhood responsible for denying them the political and social freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects. In its consideration of politics and poetics, this project offers a new approach to genre and gender that will help shape the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

Examining social and material dimensions of collaboration, this book reveals the diverse networks of nineteenth-century literary exchange.

Barrow’s timely book is the first to examine the link between Victorian poetry, the study of language, and political reform. Focusing on a range of literary, scientific, and political texts, Barrow demonstrates that nineteenth-century debates about language played a key role in shaping emergent ideas about popular sovereignty. While Victorian scientists studied the origins of speech, the history of dialects, and the barrier between human and animal language, poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy drew on this research to explore social unrest, the expansion of the electorate, and the ever-widening boundaries of empire. Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry recovers unacknowledged links between poetry, philology, and political culture, and contributes to recent movements in literary studies that combine historicist and formalist approaches.

Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment. The chapters investigate discrete cases of classicising crisis, while the Introduction highlights patterns among them. The book asks: are classical equations a prized ideal, when evidence warrants, or linkages forced by an implacable will to power, or good faith attempts to make sense of events otherwise bafflingly unfamiliar and dangerous? Finally, do the events thus classicised retain, even increase, their power to disturb and energise, or are they ultimately contained? Classicising Crisis: The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire is essential reading for students and scholars of classics, classical reception, and political thought in Europe and the Americas.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), one of the most distinctive writers of the Victorian period. The first selection to place Clough's poetry alongside his prose, it allows readers to explore how his poems are connected to his literary criticism and his lectures on literary history, to his letters and diaries, and to his writing on politics and economics. A political radical and religious sceptic, Clough emerges as a strikingly modern Victorian: he writes honestly and directly about sexuality, and his work is informed by a cosmopolitan perspective that views Victorian society in the context of other national, political, and cultural traditions. Clough's innovative poems incorporate a diverse range of voices and styles, borrowing and reimagining aspects of the epic, the drama, and the novel. And they reveal a side of Victorian culture--irreverent, iconoclastic, and self-aware--that is often ignored today. Detailed notes identify and explain Clough's comments on major political events such as the European revolutions of 1848, and his allusions to a wide array of different writers and texts. The edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Clough, and a Chronology, which enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works.

Embracing the viewpoints of Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox thinkers, of conservatives, liberals, radicals, and agnostics, Christianity today is anything but monolithic or univocal. In The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, general editor Adrian Hastings has tried to capture a sense of the great diversity of opinion that swirls about under the heading of Christian thought. Indeed, the 260 contributors, who hail from twenty countries, represent as wide a range of perspectives as possible.Here is a comprehensive and authoritative (though not dogmatic) overview of the full spectrum of Christian thinking. Within its 600 alphabetically arranged entries, readers will find lengthy survey articles on the history of Christian thought, on national and regional traditions, and on various denominations, from Anglican to Unitarian. There is ample coverage of Eastern thought as well, examining the Christian tradition in China, Japan, India, and Africa. The contributors examine major theological topics such as resurrection, the Eucharist, and grace as well as controversial issues such as homosexuality and abortion. In addition, short entries illuminate symbols such as water and wine, and there are many profiles of leading theologians, of non-Christians who have deeply influenced Christian thinking, including Aristotle and Plato, and of literary figures such as Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy. Most articles end with a list of suggested readings and the book features a large number of cross-references.The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought is an indispensable guide to one of the central strands of Western culture. An essential volume for all Christians, it is a thoughtful gift for the holidays.