Romanticism

This chapter offers an overview of the relationship between Gothic and Classical literature and aesthetics in Britain in the long eighteenth century. British writers increasingly felt haunted by the ghosts of the Classical past, and Gothic literature rediscovered what was spectral and grotesque about the art and literature of Greece and Rome. Authors considered include Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mary Shelley. Final version now published in Angela Wright & Dale Townshend, ed. The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2020), 161-79.

From the "Introduction" to the book in which this chapter appears, by Daniel O. Dahlstrom:

Although scholars have addressed many aspects of Kant’s highly critical reviews of Herder’s philosophy of history, less attention has been paid to a main target of Kant’s criticisms. The target is precisely the way that Herder grounds history in a conception of force akin to a conception that Kant himself had once embraced. In “Herder’s Theory of Organic Forces and Its Kantian Origins” (Chapter 6), Nigel DeSouza demonstrates not only the conception of the unfolding forces in nature that underpin Herder’s philosophy of history but also how that conception draws on his reading of Kant’s pre-critical writings, even as it moves beyond them. Crucial to his development beyond Kant and other predecessors is, DeSouza shows, his insistence on a parallel between the soul’s relation to its body and God’s relation to his creation. Just as the soul animates and organizes the body while interacting with it, so God realizes and externalizes himself in the universe. In both cases, an invisible force and a visible form interpenetrate. Herder contends, moreover, that when it comes to understanding nature at any level, our only recourse is to analogy with the soul’s operations. Based on this analogy, he reasons that organic forces pervade all of nature and the history that supervenes on it. The notion that these forces are all organic hearkens back to Leibniz’s notion that “all things are full of life,” yet it does so, as DeSouza observes, with a crucial difference, since Herder refuses to accept Leibniz’s differentiation of a realm of efficient causes from final causes. While acknowledging that Herder, from a Kantian perspective, is guilty of doing “dogmatic metaphysics,” DeSouza suggests in conclusion that there are patent advantages to taking on the arduous challenges presented by Herder’s alternative approach.

This book examines a wide range of dissident practices, from street protests to political poetry, in an attempt to demonstrate that they are becoming an increasingly important aspect of global politics. The author draws on several case studies, including an analysis of the events that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The theoretical discussions focus on how people influence the course of politics at a time when boundaries between domestic and international spheres are blurring.

In this article I bring clarity to the academic study of spirituality and its many controversies. I begin by distinguishing between two projects that together constitute the field: the study for and the study of spirituality. I argue a good deal of the confusion surrounding 'spirituality' is the result of scholars failing to make this distinction. Next, I outline the few areas of agreement within the study of spirituality in order to illuminate what I consider the issue that defines the field: the merits and shortcomings of late modernity. By late modernity I mean the current era, whose origins can be traced roughly to the 1960s. I then offer a meta-analysis of the social-cum-political frameworks commonly used to study spirituality, delineating them according to their assessments of the contemporary epoch. I contend this is a useful and much-needed means of dispelling some of the fuzziness that characterizes the field.

The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse – the presumption that there was a ‘golden age’ of British coffeehouse society in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries which entered into a state of decline during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and finds it wanting. The article suggests that the history of the coffeehouse public sphere is better understood in terms of a transformation from an early modern ‘performative publicity’ to a Romantic style of public life which reflected changing notions of the relationship between the self and society that have been identified by cultural historians of the Romantic age. Rather than trying to identify the moment of its decline, historians should try to explain the continuing vitality of the coffeehouse, and by extension the coffeehouse public sphere, as they have evolved over the course of the last three and a half centuries.

Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

With its primary focus on the fourth and final act of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, this article pursues the connection between Shelley’s redefinition of marriage vows and his broader hopes for cultural reform in order to show how this closet drama from 1819 supplies the conditions of possibility that make same-sex marriage a present-day reality. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound sets the stage/altar for romantic relationships (same-sex or otherwise) still
“unbeheld” and “unimagined” through representations of gender- and timebending.
I submit that the epithalamium, or marriage ode, presented both a
problem and a solution for a radical writer like Shelley insofar as he chose a
traditional literary form only to radicalize its ideological function. Looked at in
this light, Shelley’s verse drama refuses to close the door to further social and
political advance.

What does the history of exploration look like when approached from a different disciplinary perspective, that of the history of books? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this essay reframes exploration histories that typically retrace continuities between explorers, by focusing instead on the discontinuities in the changing conditions of authorship and publication. Specifically, the essay considers the convergence of exploration and book history at three critical junctures: at the turn of the eighteenth century (Dampier), in the mid-to-late eighteenth century (Cook), and in the early nineteenth century (Ross). What if we shifted the ground of inquiry away from the geographic routes these explorers retraced, to the publication protocols that made their books possible in their particular forms, under changing models of authorship? And what if we expanded our inquiry beyond metropolitan print, to include inscriptions in site-specific media-like stone and ice? By looking at the contingent circumstances of publication, inscription, and authorship within eighteenth-century British exploration, the essay uncouples the seemingly unchanging relations between exploration, publication, and authorship.

Book Jacket blurb, for what it's worth: "A sharply focused analysis of how and why romantic writers drew on gothic conventions whilst, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of gothic writing, including its institutional and commercial recognition as a form of literature, played a fundamental role in the development of romanticism as an ideology. In doing so he examines the early history of the romantic movement and its assumptions about literary value, and the politics of reading, writing, and reception at the end of the eighteenth century. As a whole the book makes an original contribution to our understanding of genre, tracing the impact of reception, marketing, and audience on its formation."

The present study seeks to investigate the arrangement of the science of mythology at the turn of the 19th century, and an understanding of the scientific work, which enabled to consider mythology a discipline. The research in a case of interpretation of the notions of myth and symbol explores prerequisites and framework for the study. The findings of the research illustrate the role of the disciplinary argument and publishing strategies in the debates surrounding mythology’s conceptual bases. The research demonstrates that at the turn of the 19th century mythology was established both as a subject of research and as a discipline in its own right on the crossroads of disciplinary arguments, knowledge differentiation and knowledge distribution strategies.

The links between creativity, self-expression and leisure practices are underexplored within leisure literature. Despite research that documents the centrality of leisure as a worked-at process of self actualisation and self identity (Stebbins, 2004, for example), the practice of leisure is still predominately viewed as one of consumption rather than production and of passivity rather than creativity. This paper, supported by empirical evidence through qualitative research into the lives of users of the leisure spaces of the 'provincial bohemia' of the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, argues that there is a strong component of creativity in this group's leisure activity. This component, we argue, has, in recent years, become more important for 'aesthetic-reflexive' social actors in particular, as acts of selfauthored and individual-expressive creativity have become more central to economic production, and to social identity. The rise in creative leisure is strongly linked to the valorisation of the romantic-artistic ethic of inalienable creative self-expression and the rejection of mass and putatively passive forms of leisure consumption common within previous Fordist modes of economic production and social ordering.

This paper argues that linguistic typology, and linguistics more generally, got off to a good start in the 19th century with scholars like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Georg von der Gabelentz, where the understanding that a language manifests a world view, and it is important to study and compare those world views. This tradition is still alive, but was sidelined and even denigrated for many years due to the rise of Structuralism, which attempted to study language structures divorced from their linguistic and socio-cultural contexts. The paper reviews the understandings the early scholars had and points out their similarities with cutting edge current views in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, and interactional linguistics, which had to be rediscovered due to the influence of Structuralism for so many years. It then argues that we should make linguistic typology more modern, scientific and empirical by returning to our roots.

I: A Problematic Concept Attempts to define Romanticism characteristically begin by conceding the difficulty, even impossibility, of the task. The entry on the subject in an encyclopedia of German literary history summarizes the challenge: "The Romantic movement must be understood as a unity, but it is in itself so polymorphous and contradictory that both a definition and an historical presentation are extraordinarily difficult." 1 Rather than proposing a normative definition, as if that were possible, this chapter will take the resistance to definition and its historical roots as keys to understanding Romanticism as distinctly European and modern. Accordingly, the focus here will be less on the art produced during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Romanticism began to be theorized as a contemporary concern, than on discursive selfunderstanding in that unsettled period in which, as the poet William Wordsworth acknowledged, "a shock had then been given / To old opinions; and the minds of all men / Had felt it." 2 Inaugurating modern scholarship on the subject in 1870, Rudolf Haym argued that "to investigate the essence of Romanticism from a purely historical position [in rein historischer Haltung]" had become possible because it lay over half a century in the past-by Haym's account, in the circle of the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), Ludwig Tieck, and F. W. J. Schelling in the university town of Jena. 3 Many others, however, have questioned whether there ever was such a thing as Romanticism. Indeed, from its earliest articulations the concept of Romanticism has been haunted by a sense of its lack of correspondence to empirical reality. Thus the Russian poet Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky complained in 1824, "Romanticism [Romantizm] is like a phantom. Many people believe in it; there is a conviction that it exists, but where are its distinctive features, how can it be defined, how can one put one's fingers on it?" 4 The perceived elusiveness of Romanticism itself is due largely to the diversity of the intellectual and artistic phenomena-in literature, music, the visual arts, philosophy, even science-to which the term has been applied, across most European nations. In some, like Germany and France, the identification of Romantic "schools"

In this article I analyze the politics of several Cossack-themed texts from Galicia written in Polish between the Congress of Vienna and the Crisis of 1848. I offer an interpretation of Romantic politics, in which nationalism is not its main driving force. Symbols of ethnic belonging and stories of ethnic conflict could be instrumentalized in partisan struggles that were not fundamentally nationalist but were reinterpreted as such only by later generations. From the 1820s to the 1840, the representations of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and haidamaky in Galicia depended not so much on the national choices made by the writers, as on their attitude toward the gothic dream of violent revolution. The proper interpretation of these Cossack stories allows us to locate their authors in the spectrum extending from the moderate conservatism through reformist liberalism to revolutionary democracy. These political currents prevalent in Vormärz Galicia do not seem to differ much from the tendencies in the rest of Restoration Europe.

This article examines the relationship of the young Giovanni Papini to the notion of imperialism. The period of Papini's intellectual formation was a time of intense debate among the Italian intelligentsia concerning imperialism and its relationship to nation and culture. He joined the conversation with a distinctive interpretation of the idea, one that could at once make him heir apparent to the tradition of Umbertian nationalism, while also rejecting the positivist slant of his forebears. William James's porous conception of the subject and Papini's sense of his own fragmented subjectivity provided the ground for a psychological understanding of imperialism: one that relied on knowledge and appreciation, which translated into literature at the individual level, and into culture at that of the nation. Ultimately, however, disappointments abroad, the demands of nationalist politics, and Papini's own avant-garde posture, led him to abandon his intellectual empire in favour of a more concrete one.

This article explores how Romantic literatures imagine the lives of and reconfigure encounters with poplar trees. It pays particular attention to German-language writing, its arboreal contexts, and the aesthetic modes of talking and listening to poplars. The Romantics, I argue, were interested in poplars not (only) because they were aesthetically pleasing objects, but because poplars evidently made themselves known as self-expressive subjects of a lifea life that the poplars themselves, in turn, imposed upon Romantic poetics. The article reads Romantic poplars as deeply entrenched in the material semiotics of human-tree histories, co-habitation, and the various forms of mourning and remembering with poplars in the Romantic period. Approaching Romantic writing with poplars as a form of sympoetics that is closely connected to poplars outside of the texts, the article analyzes selected poplar writings transcending realms of the symbolic and translating the nonverbal soundscapes of poplar articulations into written texts.

In this paper, I critique the prevalent notion that only in the abyss can one emerge to be the Übermensch, or to use Hollingdale's term, the Superman. To support this, I will first expound on the notion of the abyss as ethical nihilism from the perspective of the death of God to Nietzsche's critique of morality. I argue that ethical nihilism as an abyss is insufficient in constituting Nietzsche's Superman. I will then set how the Superman emerges through counter-stages. The paradox is that such tragic an abyss that serves as conditio sine qua non for the Superman falls flat when looked at in the perspective of life. There underlies a fundamental difficulty in simply accepting the proposals of acknowledging the abyss or 'becoming what one is.' Later, Nietzsche's anti-romanticism and anti-Darwinism are explored to support such difficulty.

Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.

This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions of French sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante) and experimentations with the evolving form of drama (drame). Inchbald’s adaptation of Gresset’s The Villain (Le Méchant) into a farce, Young Men and Old Women, demonstrates techniques applied to The Massacre and Every One Has His Fault. The paper concludes with a comparison of The Massacre to its source, Louis‐Sébastien Mercier’s drama, Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux (1773), the first documentation of this once‐uncertain genealogy. This comparative analysis shows that Inchbald’s tragedy critiques the comic improbability that women stand to lose their femininity if they involve themselves in public issues.

Review Essay in Victorian Literature and Culture (2017) of books and articles, including among others: The Sky of Our Manufacture, by Jesse Oak Taylor; Green Victorians, by Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson; and Chaos and Cosmos, by Heidi C. M. Scott.

Romantic activity is a social psychological phenomenon. Gender, race, and peer networks are key contexts for understanding the social construction of this behavior as gender-and race-based norms structure feelings and behaviors that define "appropriate" romantic activity and peer networks serve as incubators of this activity. With a nationally representative sample of adolescents ( N = 8510) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study explored the linkages among peer networks, conceptions of idealized romantic relationships and actual romantic relationships, and the ways in which gender and race moderate these associations. Several characteristics of peer networks predicted adolescent attitudes about romantic behaviors as well as actual romantic behavior. Moreover, the linkages among peer networks, romantic attitudes, and romantic behaviors varied by race.

He that's mounting up must on his neighbour mount, And we and all the Muses are things of no account. W.B. Yeats, "The Curse of Cromwell" 1 This treasure is the reserve of poetry, the source of emotional renewal from which the centuries to come will draw. It cannot be transmitted without being transformedotherwise, we have perversion. Paul-Émile Borduas et al., "Refus Global" 2

Can a lyric touch? And if so, who does the touching? These questions put pressure on some persistent debates over lyric, which turn on a series of separations: between poet and fictional speaker, between ritual events and imagined worlds, and between transhistorical forms and historical reading practices. The prospect of touch in lyric suggests an intimate, personal, and embodied form of contact between speaker and addressee, while at the same time potentially extending that contact to any receptive reader or listener.

I submit for your consideration the following hypothesis: a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre" (212) N THE LAST two decades, critics like Stuart Curran, Jacques Derrida, and Tzvetan Todorov have stated in various ways that genre "is the driving force of [. ..] all literary history"-that "there is no genreless text." This essay seeks to focus on the less-acknowledged corollary of such assertions: that generic classification also depends on readerspublishers, critics, and the public-who ultimately determine a text's identity and value. The interplay between writers and readers drives not only Derrida's caution concerning "participation" and "belonging" but also Fredric Jameson's definition of genre as a "social contract" between any "writer and a specific reading public" (160). If both formulations give significant importance to readers, they still present genre as an instance of friendly socialization or negotiation, where various parties combine to determine textual meaning and where all must agree on the nature of a text's participation before any act of belonging, however temporary, can occur.

Mead's lifelong interest in Romanticism is the least studied aspect of his work. As summarized in Movements of Thorrght in the Nineteenth Century, Meadian explorations in romantic philosophy and sociology provide a valuable insight into his substantive contributions. The present paper seeks to amplify this insight and explores its relevance to the interactionist tradition in sociology. Special attention is given to the Meadian claim that the modern notion of self first appears in the romantic literature. Mead's emphasis on the interplay between the social structure and the structure of the self is linked to the romantic vision of the self as the microcosm of the social macrocosm. The current controversy over Mead and Chicago sociology is given a new interpretation in light of the dialectical premises inherent in the Meadian and romantic theories of self. Some eighteen years ago Strauss (1964:xviii) observed that "the romantic writers had a profound influence upon Mead." A decade later Gouldner (1973:349) drew attention to the fact that "it was largely through Mead's influence that systematic Romanticism permeated one wing of the Chicago School of sociology, gave it its coherence and its unique character.. . ." Despite these intriguing suggestions, only scant effort has been made so far to explore systematically the continuity

William Blake’s illuminated books are full of depictions of the monstrous, like Orc’s or Urizen’s metamorphoses, bestial figures such as the Leviathan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793), and the masses of blood and flesh appearing in The Book of Urizen (1794). In contrast to eighteenth-century discourses in which moral virtue and monstrosity were polar opposites, Blake’s universe is more complex and presents an ambivalent attitude towards revolution and social transgression embodied in the monstrous. The meanings of the monstrous in Blake are associated with evil in his works, where it can be
understood as released or repressed energies, two types which correspond, respectively, to liberation or alienation. Via countercultural influence, Blakean antinomianism filtered down to Alan Moore, for whom the notion of evil depends on perspectives; thus, in Moore, the socially unacceptable can appear as monstrous, but monstrosity is also a mode through which to make visible the oppressive order that defines transgression as such. This article will discuss Blake and Moore’s use of visual and verbal aesthetics to identify as monstrous characters like Satan, Urizen and Orc in Blake and William Gull, Asmodeus and Cthulhu in Moore to pinpoint the meanings that underlie them and how the direct or indirect Blakean influence operates in Moore’s works. This will contribute to trace changes in their meanings as they pass from signifying energy to tyranny, from unfallenness to fallenness, or from conventional to visionary perception. This exploration will also show the changes in their mode of representation, contributing to understand the peculiarities of the Gothic side of Moore’s construction of Blakean vision. To do this, a series of parallels found in several examples from Alan Moore’s graphic novels will be analysed, especially Swamp Thing (1984–1987), where the hero is a vegetable–human hybrid; From Hell (1989–1998), where the villain acts as both mad scientist and monster in his perverse endeavour to violently reshape female desire to his will; Promethea (1999–2005), where a divine emanation is perceived as a threatening devil by opposing fundamentalists; and finally the horrible entities in Neonomicon (2010–2011) and Providence (2015–2017).

REsuME: Tout au long de sa longue carriere, Henri Lecoq a eu une reputation contrastee dans la communaute scientifique. Son oeuvre est citee par Mendel et par Darwin; cependant certains de ses compatriotes, tels qu'Adolphe Brongniart lui ont denie originalite et profondeur. Dans une certaine mesure, Lecoqa subi le destin de beaucoup de naturalistes provinciaux dont les efforts n'etaient pas vraiment reconnus par les maitres de la discipline. Mais une explication plus specifique se trouve peut-etre dans I'habitude qu'avait Lecoq d'utiliser dans Ie meme texte differents styles consideres comme incompatibles. Son travail sur I'hybridation vegetale est acet egard significatif : des bribesde vulgarisation hautesen couleurs y cotcient des conseils pratiques pour les horticulteurs, et les descriptions pittoresques s'y melent aux reflexions theoriques, Au terme de cette etude, Lecoq apparait comme un homme de science qui combine un sens aigude I'observation avec Iescaracteristiques d'un auteur romantique.

Is anarchism itself a form of what Jerome J. McGann called “romantic ideology,” privileging passion over reason, the affective over the cognitive? An answer is more difficult to give than might be readily apparent. On the one hand, anarchists have defined their political identity against romanticism as the literature of “tender, delicate, distinguished souls, aspiring to heaven, and living on earth as if in spite of themselves (Bakunin).” However, the anarchist tradition does betray a certain romantic genealogy, and anarchists such as Louise Michel, Gustav Landauer, and Rudolf Rocker have often evinced fascination with what Proudhon lambasted as a “literature of decadence.” Ultimately, rather than rendering a definitive political judgment on romanticism, anarchists come to enlist elements of its poetry and philosophy to organize affects in response to changing historical conditions.

Sociology has neglected the terrain of the gay Muslim single as a sociological phenomenon. Produced and managed via meaningful social conduct, the gay Muslim single often holds negative symbolic and cultural worth, one of lacking identification and presence. The stigma of the gay Muslim single is actively reproduced through social and power relations. I examine multiple stigmas and dichotomies by using autoethnography to illustrate the human lived experience of a gay Muslim single, who is silenced, invisibilized, and embodies a social life of "emptiness." The gay Muslim single, bringing about a "moral panic," confronts temporal regulations, norms, and values, notably those of heterosexual ones in everyday social life. He is cast as an "outsider," which reinforces his stigma in everyday social life.

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations,
even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a
post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an antiapocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love.

This article explores the role that language played in the development of national identity in Romanian cultural discourses from the writings of Dimitrie Cantemir in the 18 th century to those of Mihai Eminescu in the second part of the 19 th century. The article also makes use of the theories of Daco-Roman continuity and the theory of Latin descent. Seen in relation to the Latinization of Romanian that occurred in the 18 th and the 19 th centuries, these concepts are considered as contributing to the emergence of the so-called Romanian exceptionality. Cantemir's and Eminescu's writings are analysed in relation to the rise of fascism in interwar Romania as well as to the transformation of internationalist communism into nationalism after the purges of the 1950s and the reorientation of the Romanian socialist regime towards the Right. The use of language for political purposes is ultimately considered as one of the elements that contributed to the hold that fascism and nationalism had on the Romanian psyche, so much so that nationalism survived (and was indeed boosted) throughout the socialist period and into post-socialism. The article concludes that this has contributed to the ongoing identity crisis of the national self-image and will continue to do so in the 21 st century .

This paper seeks to establish German Romanticism as the foundation for the process of formation of the humanities as a discipline. The research aims to enquire into the ideas that were crucial for the formation of mythology into discipline. The research explores the role of the romantic philosopher and philologist Friedrich Creuzer’s arguments in relation to the history of science of mythology. The findings of the research illustrate the impact of the different positions in the debates surrounding mythology in the age of German Romanticism and German Idealism on the development of the humanities as a discipline. At the same time as he was studying the symbolism and mythology of the ancients he was acutely influenced by romantic ideas. We suggest that this fact is crucial for the interpretation of the history of mythology as a subject and as a discipline along with the complex interactions between historical, philological and philosophical arguments in Creuzer’s work.

Since the turn of the millennium, theologians and secular scholars of religion have increasingly begun exploring the relationship between transhumanism and religion. However, analyses of anti-transhumanist apocalypticisms are still rare, and those that exist are situated mainly among broader explorations of religious and secular bioconservatism. This article addresses this lack of specificity by drawing analyses of transhumanism and religion into dialogue with explorations of contemporary demonology through a close study of the beliefs of the evangelical conspiracist Thomas Horn and the anti-transhumanist milieu around him. Exploring the milieu's multifaceted demonology of the secular world in light of genealogies of religion and secularity, the article situates Horn's demonology as one attempt to negotiate these genealogies, using what Sean McCloud terms a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” that sees spiritual forces as the structural base of reality. It argues that, while fringe, milieus like Horn's illuminate broader cultural tensions and genealogical relations surrounding the place of religion in a secular(izing) world.

On his first trip to Greece from 1809 to 1811, Lord Byron became intensely preoccupied with Modern Greek language, literature, and print culture. This paper probes that interest by examining Byron’s response to an 1810 Edinburgh Review article that begins as an even-handed analysis of Modern Greek literature but ends up disparaging Modern Greek writers and making the common claim that Modern Greek is a degenerated form of Ancient Greek. Although Byron’s interest in Modern Greek literature and language remains a neglected aspect of the poet’s work, this paper argues that his championing of Modern Greek literature gestures toward his broader support for a stronger intercultural relationship between Greece and Britain. Further, this paper contends that Byron’s defense of Romaic (vernacular) Greek, which comes during a period when a Hellenic model of Greece is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe, represents the poet’s attempt to move away from solely classical conceptions of Greece and to familiarize British readers with a contemporary culture with which they were very little acquainted.

"The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century
historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach to history. This article places
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward
Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenthcentury
historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception.
Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over
visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages
rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the
“gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in
the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability,
and in narrative authority."