Kant’s famous comparison of his transcendental critique to a revolution serves as the departure point for Nicolas Halmi’s chapter, which also explores the powerful conjunction between philosophy, criticism, and poetry in early German and British Romanticism, marked by acute self-consciousness. Halmi first discusses changes in the concept of revolution, and how the new meaning lent itself to politics and to philosophy, which both sought to give the subject greater autonomy and self-governance. He then examines different theories developed in response to Kant but also to the Revolution and its perceived failure, many of which call for a moral and intellectual revolution of the self as a preparation for democratic reform. These include Fichte’s theory of scientific knowledge, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Friedrich Schlegel’s transcendental poetry, and Shelley’s defence of the poetic imagination as a source of moral sympathy. Key ideas presented in the chapter include Bildung, the Absolute, Wechselerweis, romantic irony, and allegory. Halmi concludes with a section on Wordsworth’s poetic reform in the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that it emerged as a conservative reaction to revolution.

This interlude argues that Percy Shelley’s closet drama The Cenci reunites honor with affect. Refiguring Godwin’s “true honor,” Shelley suggests that the artistic depictions of his degraded heroine Beatrice Cenci prompt a different form of universal dignity – and intersubjective connection – without succumbing to a dichotomy between “concrete,” perhaps chauvinist, solidarity and feminine care. Crucial here is Shelleys suggestion about drama, which, through its logic of iterative re-enactment, reveals the material persistence of archaic honor codes, as well as the insistence of new modes of dignity.

The poet’s conservative revisioning of the Swiss myth is developed in Chapter Six, which looks at Restoration-period representations of Switzerland, unearthing what Paul Hamilton calls the ‘political imaginary’ of the Restoration. After discussing the country’s socio-political situation as well as changes between the Grand Tour and modern tourism, I explore how Whig and Tory travelers alike, including Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Mackintosh, Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Francis Jeffrey tried to revive their liberal hopes in Switzerland after 1814 by revisiting Whiggish topoi, but also by meditating over the ruins of revolution. I then look at Hemans’s and Scott’s late Romantic representations of the Swiss myth as a model of Christian patriotism and domestic attachment, yet one which never completely sheds its residual significance as a democratic trope. Drawing on Switzerland’s medieval past, and notably on the story of William Tell and on the wars of liberation, their texts offer a paradoxical mix of conservative and progressive values, or what I call Restoration republicanism.

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.

Key Romantic authors sought to salvage hope and love as virtues separable from theology and without a clear basis in faith. We find in Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Goethe a post-theological insistence on the absolute value of hope and love as forms of imagination that free us from the constraints of experience. For Wordsworth, hope – political, social, though ultimately transcendent – is continuous with imagination, and thus also “intellectual” or spiritual love. Shelley repeatedly sought substitutes for faith within the Christian triad he would otherwise maintain: Queen Mab advances joy, hope, and love; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” love, hope, and self-esteem. Shelley yokes the re-envisioned theological virtues to the service of an erotic vision of polity, without entirely surrendering hope in individual immortality or its possible secular equivalents. Goethe concludes his masterpiece Faust with a quasi-Dantean vision of Faustus’s redemption by his sublime hopes, intermixed with few if any good deeds and many bad ones, in a heaven without God or evil. Indeterminate hope does the work of faith in Goethe’s poem, just as moral hope does in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Romantic nature writing emerges at roughly the same time as the industrial innovations that will eventually lead to global carbon capitalism and therefore is for some scholars coeval with the birth of the Anthropocene. This chapter takes a genealogical approach to the Anthropocene by suggesting that there are significant continuities between Romantic literature and contemporary discourses on environmental catastrophe. Focusing on two case studies – William Cowper’s The Task and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which responded to climate change caused by volcanic eruptions – this chapter shows how Romantic writers address what it means to be alive at a catastrophic turning point in planetary history. They are concerned with the power of the human imagination to shape its environments, yet also with our vulnerability to elemental forces that we may affect but that we cannot control.

The final, two-part chapter treats the arc of Wordsworth’s poetry after 1820 up to his final volume of original poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, in 1842. Treating explicitly the issue of Wordsworth’s age and the issue of the “late Wordsworth,” the first part of this chapter takes up his process of retrospection – looking back at his life – and re-collection – changing, reordering, and recombining his literary corpus. It touches upon the Ecclesiastical Sketches and Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems.The second part treats “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837,” an account Wordsworth’s long-delayed tripto Italy. Ironically, during the period of Wordsworth’s life when his poetry strikes us as being the least compelling aesthetically, he was probably at his most persuasive as a force within his own culture and society. Cox shows that the Italian memorials are an opportunity for Wordsworth to assert the power of his poetry in confronting not only a powerful cultural Other in Catholic Italy but also an Other Italy found or invented by Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and particularly Byron, ironically his younger precursors on this ground. Taking up topics from Wordsworth’s relationship to tourism to the religious valence of these last poems, this chapter concludes the overall argument that “late” Wordsworth developed in response to his younger contemporaries.

Wordsworth’s sonnets on the River Duddon appeared in 1820 to almost universal applause and marked a shift in his reputation and status as a poet. What has not been understood is how imbricated these poems are in a dialogue with Coleridge, whom Wordsworth alludes to, and with Shelley, whose “Mont Blanc” appears to be echoed throughout the series. This chapter provides a key instance of the complex interactions between these writers, as Shelley in “Mont Blanc” echoes in order to critique both Wordsworth and Coleridge and as Wordsworth then responds in these sonnets. Various paratexts, including the notes to the poems and Wordsworth’s postscripts, help us see how Wordsworth explicitly alludes to minor poets and to Coleridge’s unfinished “The Brook” while masking his debt to his younger competitor, whom Wordsworth would later call “one of the best artists of us all.” Offering readings of individual poems as well as the series as a whole, this chapter shows how Wordsworth, in answering Shelley, the famous agnostic, resituates his earlier nature poetry in a more clearly religious frame.

Wordsworth published his Excursion in 1814 to stake his claim to being the Milton of his day: the poem was seen as the period’s most serious attempt at an epic poem. After briefly taking up Wordsworth’s goals in writing this long narrative poem, this chapter focuses on Hazlitt’s critique of the epic and on the efforts of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Peacock, Reynolds, and Hunt to rewrite it. Recognizing the power of The Excursion, the younger writers found it embracing a turn inward to the self rather than outward to sexual relations and also abandoning the attempt to reform society, whether through revolution or other means. These poets also contested the style of The Excursion, which they saw as abandoning the experimental turn of Wordsworth’s earlier poetry. The very mode of these responses to Wordsworth – the fantastic pagan romances of Endymion and Rhododaphne, the eastern quests of “Alastor” and Laon and Cythna, even the “romaunt” of Childe Harold – announce their distance from The Excursion. A "Coda" to the chapter shows how Wordsworth’s classicizing poems, particularly "Laodamia" and "Dion," can be read as a rebuke to young writers’ revolutionary take on politics and sexuality.

While written in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was only published in 1819 as part of his effort to contest the dominance of Scott and Byron in narrative poetry. As contemporary responses make clear, the poem could be read as a rebuke to Byron’s celebration of villain-heroes: what came to be known as Byronic heroes, morally mixed but charismatic men. Wordsworth’s earlier participation in a collective satire on Byron suggests how Peter Bell responds to Byron and helps make sense of the ways in which Byron, Shelley, and Hunt saw the poem as a rejection of their ongoing work. While Wordsworth offered the poem as an example of the ways in which natural experiences can lead to spiritual reform, his turn to a Methodist preacher at the climax of the poem enraged his younger contemporaries, who saw Methodism as a key force in reactionary culture. In Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third, in Byron’s Don Juan, and in satires and reviews of Peter Bell and related works by Keats, Reynolds, and Hunt we see a collective attempt by the Cockney School to answer the challenge they heard in Peter Bell.

The “Introduction” first challenges conventional notions of influence which construct Wordsworth as a “father” to the younger poets, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It lays out a model of mutual influence, in which Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry is found to develop in a conversation with his younger contemporaries. It then establishes the intricate personal and poetic ties between Wordsworth and the “second-generation” romantics, recreating Wordsworth’s place in the post-Waterloo literary scene and how it was shaped by the developing struggle between the Lake and Cockney Schools. Our failure to understand how Wordsworth connects with “second-generation” romanticism has distorted models of his later career and created the critical commonplace of the aesthetic failure of “late” Wordsworth. The “Introduction” also supplies an overview of scholarship to date on the later Wordsworth.

This chapter, the second of two chapters focusing on the nineteenth-century prosthetic imagination, suggests that the Gothic tradition offers another way of thinking about the dead hand. It reads dead-handedness, or mortmain, as it runs through the Gothic novel of the period, from Shelley to Poe to Stoker, Stevenson and Wilde, to suggest that the Gothic offers an undertow to the work of the realist novel in transforming dead flesh into living being. The Gothic works against the realist novel, in is refusal of the animating work of narrative; but as the chapter reads this opposition, it suggests a shared investment, in both the realist and the Gothic traditions, in the tension between dead and living material, under the conditions produced by industrialisation, and by emerging information technologies.

This chapter documents an 1810–1811 epistolary prank in which Percy Shelley outlined his atheistic creed to a completely befuddled correspondent. As this exchange makes clear, Shelley’s writings against theism are attempts to counter dominant eighteenth-century perceptions of unbelief. Indeed, the poet’s letters indicate the influence such perceptions maintained well into the nineteenth century and beyond. Shelley’s promotion of atheism relies not only on logical arguments he derived from previous freethinkers and religious radicals. It also depends on his appropriation and rewriting of the various stereotypes of atheism produced throughout the preceding century. If atheists in the eighteenth century were imagined as selfish, unsociable, and incapable of sensibility, Shelley flipped the script by casting such aspersions on theists themselves.

Shelley repeatedly described himself as an atheist, and yet in his poetry he frequently explored the possibility of god-like transcendent powers, divine inspiration, and prophecy. In many of his greatest poetic works (such as Mont Blanc, Ode to the West Wind, and Prometheus Unbound), Shelley frequently invokes biblical imagery to articulate essentially Christian values (hope, charity, love) while developing his own master themes of enlightened defiance, political liberty and the struggle toward self-control. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's Greek Titan is metaphorically “crucified” for his sacrifice to help humanity. His liberation follows a personal transformation that recalls aspects of St. Paul’s writing on self-mastery. It is unclear if Prometheus’ liberation is causally linked to his own imaginative renewal, or whether there are other forces (God, Necessity, inscrutable Powers) that are instrumental. The repeated inclination to invoke both classical and biblical writing while developing themes of personal autonomy and enlightenment is one of the most interesting aspects of Shelley's work, and one of the most representative qualities of Romantic writing more generally.