
Cover -- Futures Of Enlightenment Poetry -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List Of Illustrations -- A Note On Sources And Quotations -- Introduction: Futurity Two Ways, From Milton To Now -- A Mortalist Poetics And A Familiar Future -- A Spiritualist Poetics And A Break From The Cycle -- Critical Implications -- Historical Poetics And Lyric Studies -- Materialism, Counter-materialism, And Literary History -- Personal Bearings -- Movement One: Waiting In Matter -- 1: An Education For The Present -- The Socinian Son And The Educated Word -- Time For Whiling Prolepsis And Postponement -- A Miracle In The Present -- A Milton With No Future -- Interlude: Animating Nature -- Movement Two: Rising To Spirit -- 2: Gender After Sex -- Beyond Feminine Flesh -- Rowe's Speculations About An Angelic State -- The Soul In Chains: From The Poet To The Libertine -- Spirits To Love -- The Angels Closest To God -- An Intimate God -- Lady Hertford -- Spiritualization As Feminization -- 3: Commerce After Money -- Mining In The Maritime Georgic -- Night Thoughts And Depth: The Interiorities Of Angels -- Night Thoughts And Movement: The Self-extraction Of Souls Out Of God And The Earth -- Resting In Mid-flight -- Gilded Restlessness -- 4: Creation After Reproduction -- The Embryonic -- The Immaterial -- Divine Creation And Preexistent Freedom -- Poetic Impressions In The Pleasures Of Imagination -- The Father's Line, Akenside To Darwin -- Interlude: Buried Alive -- Movement Three: Returning To Matter -- 5: The Place For Gloom -- Returning To The Body: A Summer Evening's Meditation -- Gloomy Young And The Allure Of Distress -- A Cheerful Poet And An Unoriginal Classic -- Gregory's Grief And Gloom's Value Barbauld's Late Poetry: A Future Without A Soul -- The Gloomy Body Politic -- 6: Romantic Re-embodiment And Beyond -- Mortalist Arcs: Early Wordsworth, The Lyric, And The Miltonic -- Tintern Abbey After Disembodiment -- The Faith Of The Immortality Ode -- Wheatley
This work investigates how eighteenth-century poets conceptualized the future through the tension between mortalist and spiritualist frameworks. Dustin D. Stewart, an academic specializing in eighteenth-century literature, examines how poets from Milton to the Romantic era navigated the relationship between the physical body and the afterlife. By analyzing the intersection of poetics and theology, the author argues that these writers developed distinct modes of futurity that continue to influence modern literary studies.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies recognize this text as a rigorous contribution to historical poetics and the study of secularization. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the depth of the author's engagement with theological and materialist history.
Page Count:
304
Publication Date:
2020-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press,
ISBN-10:
0192599631
ISBN-13:
9780192599636
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!