Enchantment in Romantic Literature
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Liverpool University Press
Publishing:28th Jan '25
£130.00
This title is due to be published on 28th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
‘With grace and wit, *Enchantment in Romantic Literature *dispatches not only the cynical skepticism of de Manian deconstruction and the doctrinaire demystifications of psychoanalysis and the New Historicism, but their undergirding materialist metaphysics that have become an “already-presumed form of common sense” in Romantic studies. Hopps rightly claims we’ve been “reading in the shadows of their exclusionary assumptions” for these several decades. His crisp prose, dazzlingly wide and deep research, and spot-on readings drench in light the provisionality of that critical materialism and reclaim precisely what critique puts off limits: the ways the Romantics – Byron as much as Wordsworth – transport us to the ambitious heights of Enlightenment epistemologies to face us with the open spaces of uncertainty and possibility about the very nature of reality that criticism most often overlooks and forecloses. Hopps’s ontologically open, rigorously post-secular framework is an absolute delight, uncovering an identifiable, catachrestic Romantic poetics insistently evoking that in reality which evades determinate representation. His study renders their participatory vision newly accessible, situating readers as porous beings in a relational cosmos, where it’s not at all obvious that their transcendental intimations are so much spurious nonsense to be silently left aside. This book fills me with hope for our field.’ Professor Lori Branch, University of Iowa
‘Enchantment in Romantic Literature is a learned, lively, and highly readable book. I learned an enormous amount from it, and had my own thoughts expanded by Hopps’s expansive archive. Hopps engages with Romantic studies and several related fields: post-secular studies, new materialism, literary theory, and theology. This book will be of interest to scholars in all those fields, and it joins a developing conversation about the place of both religion and Romanticism in the aftermath of critique. We need more work like this – engaged, wide-ranging, creative, and bold.’ Professor Colin Jager, Rutgers University
‘Countering the dogmatic demystification rife in literary studies over the past fifty years, Hopps casts new light on the sacral enchantments and political promptings of Romantic poetry. This magisterial study should be a vade mecum for “post-pessimistic” scholars of Romanticism.’ Professor Adam Potkay, College of William and Mary
‘I am so full of admiration for this thoughtfully conceived, erudite and timely book. Positioning itself against the aggressively secular disposition of deconstructive, materialist and psychoanalytic literary criticism and theory, Enchantment in Romantic Literature mounts a full-blooded recuperation of the transcendental and affective dimensions of Romantic-period literature, affirming its transformative potential for a new generation of readers.’ Professor Philip Shaw, University of Leicester
ISBN: 9781835537831
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
464 pages