Author: Martin Priestman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain from the 1780s onwards. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, establishing the depth of their engagement with such discourses, and in some cases their active participation. Equal attention is given to less canonical writers: such poet-intellectuals as Erasmus Darwin, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and controversialists including Holbach, Volney, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Richard Carlile and Eliza Sharples (these last two in particular representing the close links between punishably outspoken atheism and radical working-class politics). Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lend it a protean energy belied by the common and more recent conception of 'loss of faith'.
Romantic Atheism
Author: Martin Priestman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain from the 1780s onwards. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, establishing the depth of their engagement with such discourses, and in some cases their active participation. Equal attention is given to less canonical writers: such poet-intellectuals as Erasmus Darwin, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and controversialists including Holbach, Volney, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Richard Carlile and Eliza Sharples (these last two in particular representing the close links between punishably outspoken atheism and radical working-class politics). Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lend it a protean energy belied by the common and more recent conception of 'loss of faith'.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain from the 1780s onwards. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, establishing the depth of their engagement with such discourses, and in some cases their active participation. Equal attention is given to less canonical writers: such poet-intellectuals as Erasmus Darwin, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and controversialists including Holbach, Volney, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Richard Carlile and Eliza Sharples (these last two in particular representing the close links between punishably outspoken atheism and radical working-class politics). Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lend it a protean energy belied by the common and more recent conception of 'loss of faith'.
Religion for Atheists
Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Signal
ISBN: 0771025998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a deeply moving meditation on how we can still benefit, without believing, from the wisdom, the beauty, and the consolatory power that religion has to offer. Alain de Botton was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, and though he was powerfully swayed by his parents' views, he underwent, in his mid-twenties, a crisis of faithlessness. His feelings of doubt about atheism had their origins in listening to Bach's cantatas, were further developed in the presence of certain Bellini Madonnas, and became overwhelming with an introduction to Zen architecture. However, it was not until his father's death -- buried under a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery because he had intriguingly omitted to make more secular arrangements -- that Alain began to face the full degree of his ambivalence regarding the views of religion that he had dutifully accepted. Why are we presented with the curious choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle and effective rituals and practices for which there is no equivalent in secular society? Why do we bristle at the mention of the word "morality"? Flee from the idea that art should be uplifting, or have an ethical purpose? Why don't we build temples? What mechanisms do we have for expressing gratitude? The challenge that de Botton addresses in his book: how to separate ideas and practices from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them. In Religion for Atheists is an argument to free our soul-related needs from the particular influence of religions, even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religion that will allow us to rediscover and rearticulate those needs.
Publisher: Signal
ISBN: 0771025998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a deeply moving meditation on how we can still benefit, without believing, from the wisdom, the beauty, and the consolatory power that religion has to offer. Alain de Botton was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, and though he was powerfully swayed by his parents' views, he underwent, in his mid-twenties, a crisis of faithlessness. His feelings of doubt about atheism had their origins in listening to Bach's cantatas, were further developed in the presence of certain Bellini Madonnas, and became overwhelming with an introduction to Zen architecture. However, it was not until his father's death -- buried under a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery because he had intriguingly omitted to make more secular arrangements -- that Alain began to face the full degree of his ambivalence regarding the views of religion that he had dutifully accepted. Why are we presented with the curious choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle and effective rituals and practices for which there is no equivalent in secular society? Why do we bristle at the mention of the word "morality"? Flee from the idea that art should be uplifting, or have an ethical purpose? Why don't we build temples? What mechanisms do we have for expressing gratitude? The challenge that de Botton addresses in his book: how to separate ideas and practices from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them. In Religion for Atheists is an argument to free our soul-related needs from the particular influence of religions, even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religion that will allow us to rediscover and rearticulate those needs.
Spiritual Atheism
Author: Steve Antinoff
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582436886
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 95
Book Description
Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed: "God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist . . . But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?" According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with three realizations: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582436886
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 95
Book Description
Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed: "God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist . . . But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?" According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with three realizations: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.
Romantic Paganism
Author: Suzanne L. Barnett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319547232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the “Satanic School” by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as “Athenian” and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319547232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the “Satanic School” by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as “Athenian” and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.
Romantic Prayer
Author: Christopher Stokes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198857802
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The first study to treat poetry of the Romantic period through the motif of prayer, it covers a range of canonical writers to illustrate how prayer is central to literature's engagement with a secular age.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198857802
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The first study to treat poetry of the Romantic period through the motif of prayer, it covers a range of canonical writers to illustrate how prayer is central to literature's engagement with a secular age.
Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
Author: William Slocombe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135489351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135489351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.
Key Concepts in Romantic Literature
Author: Jane Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310379
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Book Description
Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing. The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310379
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Book Description
Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing. The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.
The New Atheist Novel
Author: Arthur Bradley
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826446299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
The first major examination of the New Atheism as a literary phenomenon.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826446299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
The first major examination of the New Atheism as a literary phenomenon.
The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion
Author: Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108482848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108482848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.
Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens
Author: Gavin Hopps
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706139X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
The relationship between literature and religion is one of the most groundbreaking and challenging areas of Romantic studies. Covering the entire field of Romanticism from its eighteenth-century origins in the writing of William Cowper and its proleptic stirrings in Paradise Lost to late-twentieth-century manifestations in the work of Wallace Stevens, the essays in this timely volume explore subjects such as Romantic attitudes towards creativity and its relation to suffering and religious apprehension; the allure of the 'veiled' and the figure of the monk in Gothic and Romantic writing; Miltonic light and inspiration in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; the relationship between Southey's and Coleridge's anti-Catholicism and definitions of religious faith in the Romantic period; the stammering of Romantic attempts to figure the ineffable; the emergence of a feminised Christianity and a gendered sublime; the development of Calvinism and its role in contemporary religious controversies. Its primary focus is the canonical Romantic poets, with a particular emphasis on Byron, whose work is most in need of critical re-evaluation given its engagement with the Christian and Islamic worlds and its critique of totalising religious and secular readings. The collection is an original and much-needed intervention in Romantic studies, bringing together the contextual awareness of recent historicist scholarship with the newly awakened interest in matters of form and an appreciation of the challenges of postmodern theory.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706139X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
The relationship between literature and religion is one of the most groundbreaking and challenging areas of Romantic studies. Covering the entire field of Romanticism from its eighteenth-century origins in the writing of William Cowper and its proleptic stirrings in Paradise Lost to late-twentieth-century manifestations in the work of Wallace Stevens, the essays in this timely volume explore subjects such as Romantic attitudes towards creativity and its relation to suffering and religious apprehension; the allure of the 'veiled' and the figure of the monk in Gothic and Romantic writing; Miltonic light and inspiration in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; the relationship between Southey's and Coleridge's anti-Catholicism and definitions of religious faith in the Romantic period; the stammering of Romantic attempts to figure the ineffable; the emergence of a feminised Christianity and a gendered sublime; the development of Calvinism and its role in contemporary religious controversies. Its primary focus is the canonical Romantic poets, with a particular emphasis on Byron, whose work is most in need of critical re-evaluation given its engagement with the Christian and Islamic worlds and its critique of totalising religious and secular readings. The collection is an original and much-needed intervention in Romantic studies, bringing together the contextual awareness of recent historicist scholarship with the newly awakened interest in matters of form and an appreciation of the challenges of postmodern theory.