Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781137494870

Table of Contents

Reviews

This book, of interest to all students of southern history, is also noteworthy for its imaginative blending of cultural and social with political history. --History: Reviews of New Books What happened to the South's memory of the Civil War?...The whole process is brilliantly described by Gaines Foster in this fascinating book. --The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution This may well be the most thoughtful and stimulating book ever written on the myth of the Lost Cause. --Virginia Magazine of History and Biography A sophisticated and adventurous new perspective on postwar southern thought. --Journal of Southern History An outstanding work that should appeal to anyone whose interest in the Civil War goes beyond the wartime battlefield and into the postwar lives of the Southern participants. --Civil War Times

Approach to liberalism constitutes at once the book's main liability and its greatest strength. ... nineteenth-century poets engaged with the progressive social thought of their day not only when they addressed it directly but in all their poems, even the most apparently private. Barton's often revelatory new formalist analyses compellingly demonstrate the real intellectual work that poetry can perform. (Erik Gray, The Review of English Studies, Vol. 70 (293), February, 2019)

“Approach to liberalism constitutes at once the book’s main liability and its greatest strength. … nineteenth-century poets engaged with the progressive social thought of their day not only when they addressed it directly but in all their poems, even the most apparently private. Barton’s often revelatory new formalist analyses compellingly demonstrate the real intellectual work that poetry can perform.” (Erik Gray,The Review of English Studies, Vol. 70 (293), February, 2019)

Author Information

Anna Barton is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available