Romantic returns
Subtitle: superstition, imagination, history
By: Deborah Elise White.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 227
Subjects: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822 -- Criticism and interpretation; Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830 -- Criticism and interpretation; Collins, William, 1721-1759 -- Criticism and interpretation; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Literature and history -- Great Britain; Romanticism -- Great Britain; Superstition in literature; Imagination in literature; History in literature
Description: "Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of "imagination" in preromantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature.

Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological - an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical - a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-218) and index.