Romanticism Books

The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism

C. S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Read C.S. Lewis' first fiction 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

If the first fiction by Lewis you read is the seven volume Narnian set, the rest of his works can appear rather puzzling. Lewis said to Tolkien, there wasn't anything available of the sort of thing he liked to read, so he'd have to write it himself; arguably both Tolkien and Lewis wrote for readers who liked to read what they liked to read, and in so doing struck a deep vein and a lost chord.

This book was originally published by Catholic publishers Ward and Sheed who naturally pitched it to their Catholic readers. However, that got Lewis regarded as an RC, a reputation he was anxious to live down, and he referred lightly to the publishers as "Ward and Sneed". That was only the first of many misunderstandings he'd be involved in simply because he wrote what he wanted, ignoring the dictates, as it were, of the market.

This book has been released in various versions. Some have, as Lewis intended, notes or annotations explaining the allegorical meaning, for instance the Red and Black savages are communists and fascists, respectively. Oddly enough, at one point Bantam published a pocket version leaving off these notes, which transforms the allegory to a "straight" fantasy, and leaves many readers confused.

Tolkien said he didn't write allegory, and the Narnian Chronicles, despite certain correspondences are not allegory, but this book is. The form is based on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Regress. Ironically, Bunyan began his work with a long poem apologizing for the fact that it's an allegory. Lewis spent much of his time apologizing that his books weren't. Why we still read them is that he refused to conform to his times (and their notion of "best-sellers", and therefore has outlived them.

Between this, his first fictional work and 'Till We Have Faces, his last, Lewis output varied widely, not in quality but in style and genre. This volume, with the graphic enhancement of a well-known illustrator of Tolkien, re-introduces us to the long-forgotten genre of allegory at its most imaginative and captivating. Lewis demonstrates his unique gift of resonating with diverse readers and making a story his own.

Editorial Review:

The first book written by C.S. Lewis after his conversion, The Pilgrim's Regress is the record of Lewis's own search for meaning and spiritual satisfaction, a search that eventually led him to Christianity. This brilliant, Bunyanesque allegory tells a fascinating story and constitutes an effective Christian apologia.

Romanticism: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies)

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since it was first published in 1995, Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology has been used and appreciated by thousands of literature students and their teachers across the globe. Now, in response to feedback from the classroom, and extensive research into the needs of lecturers, Romanticism is back in a completely revised and expanded third edition, including these new features: • An entirely new introduction • Revised headnotes and footnotes • A chronology (1770-1851) • Now features 36 illustrations, including 16 colour illustrations • An in-depth selection of works by major women Romantic poets, including complete texts of Hannah More, ‘Sensibility’ (1782) and Slavery (1788); Ann Yearsley, Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (1788); Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (1786), The Emigrants (1793) and ‘Beachy Head’ (1807); Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812); Helen Maria Williams, A Farewell, for two years, to England (1791) • Enhanced selections for Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Coleridge and Shelley (among others) • Up-to-date lists of critical reading for each author

Romanticism: An Anthology remains the only textbook of its kind to include complete and uncut texts of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, ‘The Pedlar’ and other Recluse fragments (1798); Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (1786); Felicia Dorothea Hemans, ‘Records of Woman’ sequence (all 19 poems) (1828); and Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III and Don Juan Dedication, Cantos I and II (1819).

The Painters of Modern Life (Arts & Letters)

Charles Baudelaire

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Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) was a leading poet and novelist in nineteenth who also devoted a considerable amount of his time to criticism. Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Galaxy Books)

Meyer H. Abrams

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The Birth of the Visionary Poet 5 out of 5 stars.
66 of 67 people found this review helpful.

Our way of looking at art in the year 2000 is steeped in the Romantic mentality. The idea of the true poet as lone inspired genius, starving in a garret, creating to express his (and it generally was 'his' in those days) inner turmoil or vision is so ingrained that there almost seems no other possible standard. Yet as M.H. Abrahms points out in this scholarly, yet readable work on Romantic poetry and theory, this view of art and the artist is only as old as the age of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Up until 200 odd years ago, the artist's job had been to act as a mirror, reflecting the world as accurately as possible. The Romantics sought to reverse over 2000 years of previous art criticism by pushing the artist to the forefront and insisting that he be seen as a lamp, illuminating the world with his imagination and vision. Abrahms thoroughly examines the development of Romantic philosophy through the writings of the major English poets and thinkers of the age, drawing in discussions of continental Romanticism as well. Romantic views on Nature, God, Poets and Poetry, Truth, Vision and of course the Imagination are all thoroughly researched and meticulously compiled, making this one of the most comprehensive single volume books on the subject.

Editorial Review:

This highly acclaimed study analyzes the various trends in English criticism during the first four decades of this century.

Henry Von Ofterdingen: A Novel

Novalis

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A strange, ingenious novel, the most representative work of early German Romanticism! This extraordinary fusion of novel, fairy tale, and poem, published posthumously in 1802, is the most representative work of early German Romanticism. It reflects, in part, events in the life of its author, who is best known for his Hymns to the Night. Young Henry, a medieval poet who seeks the mysterious Blue Flower with the lovely face of the yet unknown Mathilda, sets out on a journey that is interspersed with beautiful tales and exquisite songs. Henry's "education," as he catches first glimpses of the world, is of special interest to students of philosophy as well as literature, for ingeniously involved in literary form is the crux of Fichte's mysticism. Novalis, like Rouseeau, makes an interesting contribution to the "supreme realism" that transcends the ordinary. Henry von Ofterdingen is an important landmark in the history of literature and the most distinguished work of its brilliant and tragic author.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature

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Editorial Review:

Seven years ago, W. W. Norton changed the way world literature is taught by introducing The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition. Leading the field once again, Norton is proud to publish the anthology for the new century, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition. Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism

Lawrence Coupe

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Key readings on 'nature' and 'culture' 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a very welcome reader in 'green' cultural studies that includes but goes well beyond 'ecocriticism', as narrowly confined to a subdiscipline of English literature. Its stated aim is 'to stimulate debate about the 'nature' of criticism and to give green studies some much-needed bearings'(Preface).

The readings included are wide ranging, and are organised in three loosely chronological sections: Green Tradition, Green Theory and Green Reading. They have been chosen to help the reader come to terms with the age-old relationship between 'nature' and 'culture', which Jonathan Bate claims in his Foreword to be 'the key intellectual problem of the twentieth century'.

Ecocriticism is better established in the United States than in Britain. This has resulted in two related problems. First, texts on ecocriticism have up to now tended to focus on American literature and theory. Second, North Atlantic ecocriticism has not engaged with (non-English) European thought as thoroughly as it might. The Green Studies Reader goes some way towards remedying these 'faults'. While it is still firmly focussed on Anglo-American literature, (and film), it includes significant readings from key French and German thinkers.

This book is an important, even crucial, read for anyone interested in the ways in which planetary life might at last take 'its rightful place at the centre of that discipline which we might still call, though with appropriate hesitation, the humanities' (Introduction).

Editorial Review:

The Green Studies Reader is a fantastically comprehensive selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology, culture and literature. It offers a complete guide to the growing area of 'ecocriticism' and a wealth of material on green issues from the romantic period to the present. Some important aspects that are covered in depth are romantic ecology and its legacy, Nature/Culture/Gender, and environmental literary history. Included in this collection are extracts from today's leading ecocritics and figures from the past who pioneered a green approach to literature and culture. As a whole the Reader encourages a reassessment of the whole development of criticism and will offer readers a radical prospect for its future.

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

M. H. Abrams

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Cracking The Romantic Code 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 22 people found this review helpful.

M.H. Abrams takes his title from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and though he shines his lamp on that work briefly, for the most part this is a critical study which focuses on the key German and English romantics (philosophers and poets)and certain formal attributes they all shared -- namely a penchant for circular structure (golden age of mans innocence/fall from innocence/redemptive return to the beginning). What is most surprising about this study is how pervasive this circular pattern was in the romantic period. Abrams finds it in virtually every major work of philosophy and poetry in the romantic period. In doing so Abrams does not want to suggest that the romantic movement was any less revolutionary than previously thought but that the movement was a complex one that issued forth great changes in philosophy and literature not so much by inventing new forms but by finding new validity in old forms and patterns.

Abrams argues that from the time of the reformation, literature and philosophy were becoming more and more secular and that the western conception of the universe was becoming more and more "mechanized". In his earlier book Mirror and the Lamp Abrams traced the origins of romantic aesthetic theory and in so doing explained how the romantics reinvigorated art and philosophy by offering an "organic" view of the universe to counter the mechanistic view which made man feel less and less at home and more and more alien in his world. In Natural Supenaturalism Abrams elaborates that argument and shows in more detail just how individual romantics sought to resituate man in his universe. The "revolution" initiated by the romantics was not a political one Abrams argues but a cognitive one. True freedom is attained not en masse according to Blake and Wordsworth but in solitude where one learns to see the world as it is. For Abrams Wordsworth is the penultimate romantic(other romantic scholars find Blake to be the more important figure) because his poems offer man a route to personal salvation through a private communion with nature via the imagination. Wordsworth intentionally weds his own story to the story of mans fall from and eventual recovery of grace-- what is revolutionary is that Wordsworth suggests that man must not wait for the apocaplypse to be redeemed but can find redemption in this world and all by way of the sympathetic imagination. In the Preludes Wordsworth offers his own life story (and his own aesthetic theory) which is the story of one mans attempt to wed himself to nature and thus recover the natural affinity he felt for nature as a child albeit in a higher way with greater awareness. For Abrams it is the central story of romanticism and one that has a continuing influence on literary output. Though each romantic made use of the circular pattern, each did so in his own unique way and for scholars the real interest of the book will be in tracing the genesis and studying the particularities of each cosmogony and there are many offered here(Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche......), (Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt....).

Wordsworth placed a great emphasis on "memory"--for this was the thing that connected him to that first grace he knew in childhood-- in recovering his own version of paradise and so Abrams finds Proust to be Wordsworth's most direct heir. More generally Abrams finds that the circular pattern first found in classic mythology and the bible as well as in that first western autobiography - -St. Augustine Confessions-- continues to be a powerful model for writers as diverse as TS Eliot(Four Quartets) and DH Lawrence to name just two. Abrams finds the romantic rediscovery and revitalization of this circular pattern to be a key aspect of romanticism and the romantic legacy.

A Companion to Romanticism (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

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Editorial Review:

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey by an international collection of scholars, whose 52 specially commissioned contributions are aimed specifically at a student readership. Divided into four parts - Contexts and Perspectives 1790-1830; Readings; Genres and Modes; and Issues and Debates - the Companion provides students new to the subject with a vital orientation and foundation for study, and also offers senior and graduate students an important focus upon new developments and possible future directions. Contexts and perspectives vital to our understanding of the origins and evolution of the concept of Romanticism are elucidated in a section of eight introductory essays. There follow 22 readings of key texts, canonical and postcanonical, from Wordsworth's Prelude (by Johnathan Wordsworth) to Joanna Baillie's A Series of Plays (by Janice Patten) and Felicia Heman's Records of Woman (by Adams Roberts). A section on genres and modes includes Frederick on 'The Romantic Drama', John Sutherland on 'The Novel' and David Maill on 'Gothic Fiction'. In a final group of essays 15 contributors explore key issues and debates.

Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767-1867

Lance Newman, Joel Pace, Chris Koenig-Woodyard

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Worth Every Penny -- A Definitive Anthology of Literature from the Romantic Period 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

TRANSATLANTIC ROMANTICISM is a must-buy for fans of poetry or prose of the Romantic period. While by no means an exhaustive source of material for any of the notables within, this excellent anthology makes sure to include everything it can from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Equiano to Poe.

The price might seem a bit much at a glance, but I promise that after you see just how much is in this volume that you won't regret a single penny.

Editorial Review:

This eagerly-anticipated anthology offers canonical and non-canonical texts from American, British, and Canadian Romantic writers. This long-overdue anthology of Romantic literature meets the growing demand for a coherent and flexible transatlantic Romantic reader. It offers a range of representative materials by the most central, as well as non-canonical, North American and British figures. Thematic groupings and companion readings, strategically integrated throughout the book, work together to provide lively and illuminating views of the major literary, cultural, and political debates of the transatlantic Romantic century. Accessible and engaging introductions and headnotes lead to an even greater appreciation and understanding of the prose and poetry of the transatlantic Romantic era.