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For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Volume III of America's Indomitable Character concerns itself with: American character identity as represented by ten selected Colonial female authors, among them the early Colonial authors of religious freedom Anne Hutchinson and Anne Dudley Bradstreet; the Colonial adventuress Sarah Kemble Knight; Anne Cotton and her eye-witness accounts of the history of Virginia; Mercy Otis Warren, a contemporary historian of the American Revolutionary Period; Abigail Adams who gave her husband John Adams, the second President, political advice; Judith Sargent Murray, a Colonial feminist; the African-American poet Phillis Wheatley; Hannah Webster Foster, an early advocate of female education; and Susanna Haswell Rowson, America's first professional female novelist. How the Thirteen Original Colonies became states. The American Constitution and American character identity. Attempts to destroy the American Constitution. The Monroe Doctrine and American character identity. The origin and essence of Romanticism and its importance in America. A presentation of Nature, human nature, society, the social contract, and education in selected works of William Hill Brown, Philip Morin Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, David Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe. The Bill of Rights. David Crockett's Not Yours to Give Speech. Why Colonists and immigrants came to America and how they became Americans. Individualism and anti-elitism in America's character. America as a place where individuals form and decide of their own destiny; where, as Don Fredrick says, society "means nothing more than a collection of many individual citizens in the same place; where there exist not many rules telling a person what he is permitted to do, but only a few rules telling him what he cannot do. Or, at least, that is what America was when the aforementioned authors wrote about the nation."

This book is a study of 'Romantic Pantheism' and its part in the development of the Romantic theory of the Imagination. The crucial point in the history of English Romanticism came when the philosophical concept of the 'active universe' met the developing theory of the Imagination. In its leading sense, Imagination meant full response to, and implication with, the living qualities of natural objects. That is why it was able to assimilate and transform contemporary theories of merely passing interest into an important poetic approach to the universe.