Romantic Responses to Revolution through Miltonic Ideas of the Fall explores the influence of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, on a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers.
Romantic Responses to Revolution through Miltonic Ideas of the Fall explores the influence of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, on a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers. Specifically, the book examines the way in which these writers use the Fall, and the notion of ‘fallenness’ — as envisioned in Paradise Lost — as a model for writing about their roles as poets/writers in periods of political and cultural turmoil.
This book will be of value to undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Literature with a specific interest in the Romantics. The writers and texts featured — including the ‘big six’ of Romantic poets, and three canonical novels of the early nineteenth century — are very widely studied on English Literature courses across the UK, US, and Europe. This makes the book an ideal reference text or inspiration point for essays, coursework, and theses, while the concise and accessible style should be especially appealing for undergraduates and lecturers looking for an approachable overview of Romantic responses to revolution and the influence of Milton.
Introduction
Part I. Romantic Poets Responses to Miltonic Ideas of the Fall
Chapter
1. First-Generation Romantics: Revolutionary Responses to Miltonic
Ideas of the Fall
1.1. William Blake: Poetry as Rebellion Reconciling Blake and Milton
1.2. Coleridge: Retrospective Conservatism and the Intervening Voice
1.3. Wordsworth: Two Consciousnesses and The Consummation of the Poets
Mind
Chapter
2. Byron and Keats: Intergenerational Conflict and Rising from the
Fall
2.1. Byron: being/ Yourselves in your resistance: The Value of Ideological
Integrity in Cain
2.2. Keats: The Necessary Transition to a New Poetic Order
Part II. Writing from the Literary Lacuna: Divided Voices and Divided
Sympathies
Chapter
3. Frankenstein and Mary Shelleys Radical Scepticism
Chapter
4. Neither Whig, Tory, Radical, nor Destructionist: The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the Polydoxy of James
Hogg
Chapter
5. Wuthering Heights: As Different as a Moonbeam from Lightning
Reconciling Romanticism and Victorianism
Conclusion
Callum Fraser currently works as a commissioning editor at CRC Press/ Taylor & Francis. He received a PhD from Newcastle University in 2018 for research on the influence of Milton on the Romantics, as well as a related creative project. He maintains his interest in this literary period and is currently working on a Gothic novel set in rural Cumberland in 1824.
