Enchantment in Romantic Literature

At the end of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats’s speaker famously asks of the foregoing reverie: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’ This book is concerned with such ‘enchanted’ imaginings and the intimations of transcendence they convey, along with the suspicions they reflexively engender and the uncertainties with which they invite us to dwell.

The book argues that it is necessary to think anew about the Romantics’ ‘imaginative metaphysics’ on account of recent theoretical developments — to do with such things as affect theory, eco-theology, new materialism and the re-enchantment of the West — but also due to a lingering allergy to ideas of transcendence, which can be traced back to the ‘demystifying’ materialist approaches to Romanticism that dominated post-1960s criticism.

It is further suggested that under the gaze of these critical approaches, Romantic literature has been consciously cut off from the life of the reader and its affective, epiphanic and utopian dimensions have been neglected. What The Enchanted Moment proposes instead is a ‘post-secular’ approach that seeks to preserve the ontological hospitality of Romantic literature, whilst also endorsing a more participatory engagement with the text, in which the act of reading is allowed to become an existentially relevant exploration of the possible, which can transfigure our vision and open up new ways of being in the world.

Although in one sense the study is a work of ‘meta-criticism’, which seeks to recover excluded possibilities and facets of Romanticism that have been discredited by some of its most influential critics, its contentions are illustrated and their cogency explored by way of provocatively new close readings of works by Barbauld, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Radcliffe, P.B. Shelley, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth.