Romanticism is a worldview that finds expression over a whole range of cultural fields—not only in literature and art but in philosophy, theology, political theory, and social movements. In Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre formulate a theory that defines romanticism as a cultural protest against modern bourgeois industrial civilization and work to reveal the unity that underlies the extraordinary diversity of romanticism from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. After critiquing previous conceptions of romanticism and discussing its first European manifestations, Löwy and Sayre propose a typology of the sociopolitical positions held by romantic writers-from “restitutionist” to various revolutionary/utopian forms. In subsequent chapters, they give extended treatment to writers as diverse as Coleridge and Ruskin, Charles Peguy, Ernst Bloch and Christa Wolf. Among other topics, they discuss the complex relationship between Marxism and romanticism before closing with a reflection on more contemporary manifestations of romanticism (for example, surrealism, the events of May 1968, and the ecological movement) as well as its future. Students and scholars of literature, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies will be interested in this elegant and thoroughly original book.

In this combined examination of the history, theories, and practices in the teaching of English, the author presents compelling insight and practical solutions to the crisis in English education and the conflict among critical theories, radical pedagogy, classroom practice, epistemics, the pressure to vocationalize the curriculum, and the corporatization of institutes of learning.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, it explores how hostility, loss, and longing for unity are particularly appropriate terms for classic rock as well as the origins of these emotions. In essays ranging from Bob Dylan to Blackberry Smoke, this work examines how rock and roll expands, interprets, restates, interrogates, and conflicts with literary Romanticism, all the while understanding that as a term “rock and roll” in reference to popular music from the late 1940s through the early 2000s is every bit as contradictory and difficult to define as the word Romanticism itself.

“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times “[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of “sex appeal” or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age. “Anyone with an interest in cultural history will revel in the book’s range and insights. Specialists will savor the anecdotes, casual readers will enjoy the introduction to rich and exciting material. Brilliant artistic output during a time of transformative upheaval never gets old, and this book shows us why.”—The Washington Times “It’s a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book.”—Library Journal

Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a different mold than his Western counterparts. Many of Pushkin’s works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama, and yet they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Instead, the idiosyncratic and artistically mercurial Pushkin seized upon the newly unstable tragic mode to develop multiple, overlapping tragic visions. Providing new, innovative readings of such masterpieces as The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, The Little Tragedies, and The Bronze Horseman, Hanukai sheds light on an unexplored aspect of Pushkin’s work, while also challenging reigning theories about the fate of tragedy in the Romantic period.

The central theoretical argument of this book is that Marx's philosophy of praxis - first formulated in the Thesis on Feuerbach - is at the same time the founding stone of a new world view, and the methodological basis for his theory of (proletarian) revolutionary self-emancipation.

David Bowie and Romanticism evaluates Bowie’s music, film, drama, and personae alongside eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and artists. These chapters expand our understanding of both the literature studied as well as Bowie’s music, exploring the boundaries of reason and imagination, and of identity, gender, and genre. This collection uses the conceptual apparata and historical insights provided by the study of Romanticism to provide insight into identity formation, drawing from Romantic theories of self to understand Bowie’s oeuvre and periods of his career. The chapters discuss key themes in Bowie’s work and analyze what Bowie has to teach us about Romantic art and literature as well.