"In 1792, when she was 42, Joanna Southcott began writing down her prophecies, sealing them against the day they were to occur. In 1801 her publications began to appear, written in a combination of prose - sometimes plain, sometimes incantatory - and primitive verse. This pamphlet of 1802 is a sample of the flood of writings which she poured forth until her death in 1814. Joanna is visited by Satan, or Apollyon, or a Friend of Satan, and disputes with him; she triumphs; she recounts her dreams of a flying horseman, a balloon, fires in the sky. A farmer's daughter and one-time servant, she is a descendant of Bunyan in the period of Blake. Unlike Blake she reaches a wide audience, speaking most directly to the poor and to women. Visionary, deluded, or mad, she was the object of veneration and focus of a large and devoted cult."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A new edition of Barbara Taylor's classic book, with a new introduction. In the early nineteenth century, radicals all over Europe and America began to conceive of a 'New Moral World', and struggled to create their own utopias, with collective family life, communal property, free love and birth control. In Britain, the visionary ideals of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, attracted thousands of followers, who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to put theory into practice in their own local societies, at rousing public meetings, in trade unions and in their new Communities of Mutual Association. Barbara Taylor's brilliant study of this visionary challenge recovers the crucial connections between socialist aims and feminist aspirations. In doing so, it opens the way to an important re-interpretation of the socialist tradition as a whole, and contributes to the reforging of some of those early links between feminism and socialism.

The first major attempt to relate canonical Romantic texts to writings of the African diaspora.

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.