Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution captured the Victorian imagination with vivid pictures of a society in conflict. A rich, brilliant, and arresting book, it defined a crucial epoch in modern European history for generations of British readers. Nevertheless, The French Revolution has lost not only its general readership but also its academic audience, for it is not history as history is commonly practiced, and it is not literature as literature is commonly understood. Only in the past few decades has this difficult yet rewarding text moved back to the central position it deserves. In A Disimprisoned Epic, Mark Cumming elucidates the formal genesis of the French Revolution in Carlyle's literary criticism and reestablishes it as an epic experiment in literary form. He discusses specifically how The French Revolution combines the myths of epic with the facts of history; the nobility of tragedy with the grotesque absurdity of farce; the devotion of elegy with the dismissive rancor of satire; and the didactic clarity of emblem and allegory with the confusion of symbol, fragment, and phantasmagory. A Disimprisoned Epic will be useful to scholars and students of Carlyle and of Victorian British and American literature.

It has always been thought difficult, if not impossible, to define what the philosophy of Carlyle was. Ever since the publication of Sartor Resartus in 1833-1834, the view that Carlyle had a theistic conception of the universe has been defended as well as opposed. At a time, therefore, when Carlyle’s work as a whole is being reappraised, his philosophy should first and foremost be dealt with. Carlyle’s life-philosophy is based on the inner experience of a process of ‘conversion’, which set in with an incident that occurred to him at Leith Walk, Edinburgh. This study – which settles the old question of the date of the incident – demonstrates that the inner struggle, the dynamics of which are described most fully in Sartor, is analogous to the Jungian process of individuation. For the first time in critical literature, the basic ideas of Carlyle’s philosophy are thus linked to depth psychology and shown to be analogous to the fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology. In recent criticism, it has been asserted that the crisis recorded in Sartor is akin to the crisis of doubt said to underlie Jean Paul’s “Rede des todten Christus” (1796), which is probably the first poetic expression of nihilism in European literature and has become a classic. Apart from demonstrating that, in the last fifty years at least, the “Rede” has erroneously been interpreted as a dream of annihilation, this book invalidates the view of Jean Paul as victim of the skepticism of his age, and argues that, contrary to what is usually maintained, the “Rede” is not the document of a crisis, but of a belief which had become antiquated and obsolete for Carlyle.

"The Carlyle Encyclopedia focuses primarily on Thomas Carlyle. It reflects the range of his interests and resists stereotyped impression of who he was and what he believed. It covers Carlyle's entire life, without privileging any particular work or period, and locates Carlyle in his time and place, in the context of a rich and challenging age. The Carlyle Encyclopedia also gives a balanced assessment of Jane Welsh Carlyle, which avoids either belittling her or overestimating her achievement. It avoids the reductive and contradictory stereotypes of her which were offered by early biographers of Thomas Carlyle and offers instead a study of her varied friendships and her trenchant observations on contemporary life." "The Carlyle Encyclopedia will interest a variety of readers who concern themselves with literature, social history, the history of ideas, Victorian culture, and Scottish studies."--BOOK JACKET.

This book initiates a new interdisciplinary approach in the literary and philosophical treatment of Carlyle, challenging the long-held notion that his work was solely influenced by German idealism. Tracing Carlyle's intellectual inheritance through Hume, Reid, and Hamilton, Jessop argues that Carlyle was crucially influenced by Scottish philosophy and that this philosophical discourse can in turn be used to inform critical readings of his texts. The book will be of interest to readers of Carlyle, philosophers, and specialists in the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.