Overview
What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution. Timothy Michael argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France-and radicalism and repression in Britain-occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims. This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period's politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.
Full Product Details
Author: Timothy Michael (Tutor and University Lecturer, University of Oxford)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.544kg
ISBN: 9781421418032
ISBN 10: 1421418037
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 09 February 2016
Recommended Age: From 17
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
Michael offers extraordinary insights into many other matters, including the philosophy of Shelley, Coleridge and Kant... Deserve[s] a place on the bookshelf on anyone interested in British politics, American history, the history of India, philosophy (both ancient and 18th/19th century), poetry, the development of ideas and much else. Sun News Miami This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasingly clear manner. English Oxford Journals Michael's book effectively shows how, during the Enlightenment, the political was not a fixed point or concept. AmeriQuests
Michael offers extraordinary insights into many other matters, including the philosophy of Shelley, Coleridge and Kant... Deserve[s] a place on the bookshelf on anyone interested in British politics, American history, the history of India, philosophy (both ancient and 18th/19th century), poetry, the development of ideas and much else. Sun News Miami This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasingly clear manner. English Oxford Journals Michael's book effectively shows how, during the Enlightenment, the political was not a fixed point or concept. AmeriQuests This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasing clear manner. English
Michael offers extraordinary insights into many other matters, including the philosophy of Shelley, Coleridge and Kant... Deserve[s] a place on the bookshelf on anyone interested in British politics, American history, the history of India, philosophy (both ancient and 18th/19th century), poetry, the development of ideas and much else. * Sun News Miami * This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasingly clear manner. * English Oxford Journals * Michael's book effectively shows how, during the Enlightenment, the political was not a fixed point or concept. * AmeriQuests * This is a thoughtful, rigorous book written in a pleasing clear manner. * English * Not the least of the strengths of this work is the lucidity of its author's style: the clarity with which he presents and prosecutes his thesis, summarizes or elaborates particular intellectual positions and debates as he sets out their bearings on his discussion, adds considerably to the force of his insights. * European Romantic Review * Overall, this is an ambitious and illuminating book that will undoubtedly help shape the future course of Romantic studies. And, given the current political climate in the United States and around the globe, the questions it asks are immensely relevant to discourse beyond literary criticism. * Modern Philology *
Author Information
Author Website: http://www.lincoln.ox.ac.uk/Fellows/TimothyMichael
Timothy Michael is a Fellow of Lincoln College and an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford.
