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This volume collects together lectures by distinguished scholars. One lecture examines medieval religious relics, focusing on what they actually comprised and asking how these paltry items came to be so highly valued. Another lecture takes the authentic medieval Welsh literary corpus associated with Owain Glyndwr, consisting in the main of bardic eulogies rather than prophecies, and examines them in their historical context. A lecture on Alexander Pope asks what part Shaftesbury's polite wit, Mandeville's cynicism, and Augustan sentimentalism played in the poetry of England's greatest satirist. Another lecture focuses on the Romantic poets' fascination with the lens-made and projected images that the modern world has come to think of as the virtual image. A further lecture examines the choices made by young musicians in Renaissance Italy. The next lecture examines how the paradoxical doctrine of ‘the one and the multiple’ was translated into visual language in Chinese Buddhist art. In some cases, groups related to certain numbers bearing metaphorical significances; while in others, objects were simply replicated in large numbers to create a sense of awe. The final lecture explores the way the natural history of the Americas was exported to 16th-century northern European scientists and how they reacted intellectually and politically.

This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and others, in the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. It argues that, from Johnson and Boswell onwards, the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers ‘domesticated’ Byron, Shelley and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness. Biography was an influential transmitter of a myth of ‘the Romantic poet’, as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. Victorian biographers of the Romantic poets have been criticized for taming their subjects – making them respectable ‐ and biography was regarded with suspicion by the Romantic poets themselves. Yet Lives of the poets were also celebrated by critics, publishers and readers at the period, for their capacity to bring these poets home to the reader, in a sense that the poetry itself could not.

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats' intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The book re-examines some of Keats' most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats' poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

This book studies the only religion England has ever given the world, that of modern pagan witchcraft, which has now spread from English shores across four continents. The book examines the nature of that religion and its development, and offers a microhistory of attitudes to paganism, witchcraft, and magic in British society since 1800. Village cunning folk and Victorian ritual magicians, classicists and archaeologists, leaders of woodcraft and scouting movements, Freemasons and members of rural secret societies, all appear in the pages of this book. Also included are some of the leading figures of English literature, from the Romantic poets to W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Robert Graves, as well as the main personalities who have represented pagan witchcraft to the world since 1950.

The French Revolution was greeted with enthusiasm by young British writers and intellectuals like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, following the lead of slightly older ‘public intellectuals’ like Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and John Thelwall. But as the revolution turned violent, British enthusiasm for it waned. Activists for the cause of British parliamentary reform, who had embraced the revolution’s symbolic potential, were badly caught out by the turn of events. The Reign of Terror (1793–4) sealed the revolution’s fate in British cultural memory, but it was anticipated by a ‘reign of Alarm’ in England, announced by King George III’s proclamation against seditious writings in May, 1792. Originally aimed at Paine, this official encouragement of spying and informing spread rapidly, resulting in the largest number of trials for sedition and treason in British history. Paralleling official legal actions against accused traitors were unofficial vigilante acts by private citizens and institutions against persons whose liberal expressions alarmed others. These are the ‘unusual suspects’ of this book. As in the McCarthyite witch-hunts in 1950s America, the victims of this unregulated ‘hegemonic’ blacklisting are found disproportionately in academic and cultural arenas. National religious and educational bodies purged liberals, and promising literary careers were nipped in the bud. The loss to British culture is immense, if inestimable. Traces of this Alarmist trauma can be found in the works of six Romantic writers who did not find it ‘bliss to be alive [and] heaven to be young’ then: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Burns, and Blake.