Publisher's Synopsis
The essays by Vincent Newey collected in this volume focus primarily on the theme of selfhood and subjective experience in poetry and other literature from the era of Romanticism and the Romantic Legacy. There are chapters on Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, George Eliot, and Hardy - writers who, though often having a strong interest in public affairs, turn variously inwards to make trial of imagination and the individual life as sources of order and value against a background of cultural unsettlement. While closely exploring this 'journey within' from the emergence of post-Enlightenment 'psychological man' to the protomodernist preoccupation with the self as 'construct' in Byron and Hardy, the studies also address such important issues as the evolution of genres, the function and status of the artist, links between literature and politics, and recent critiques of 'Romantic ideology'. 'Existentialism' emerges as the fittest model of the human condition, stressing the necessity to create meaning in an impersonal world. By argument and approach the volume upvalues the reading and interpretation of texts as itself a significant element in the process of creativity, or 'making', by which we live.
