The Critical Idyll is a socio-literary re-evaluation of Goethe’s idyllic verse epic, Hermann und Dorothea. The revival of traditional German values as markers of national identity against the approaching revolutionary armies of the French in the early 1790s is analysed in the main figure, the archetypal German youth, Hermann. Confronted by the misery of German refugees from the left-bank territories in 1796, Hermann becomes the spokesman for a new sense of German identity. The refugee Dorothea, and her first finance, the German Jacobin who died in Paris, provide a perspective on the themes of German identity and individual freedom at this time. The national feelings Hermann expresses are based on a language and community in the German small town, rather than on earlier territorial or dynastic concepts of the German nation. The traditional literary form of the idyll is reformed through irony and parody into a modern, critical and self-reflexive work in which central themes of post-revolutionary society are foregrounded.

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature, philosophy, and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009, this book sets itself a simple, if daunting, task: that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchot's work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy, in particular (but not only) that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, the Schlegels, Hölderlin), the authors of this volume explore how Blanchot's fictional, critical, and fragmentary texts rewrite and rethink the Romantic demand in relation to questions of criticism and reflexivity, irony and subjectivity, narrative and genre, the sublime and the neutre, the Work and the fragment, quotation and translation. Reading Blanchot with or against key twentieth-century thinkers (Benjamin, Foucault, de Man), they also examine Romantic and post-Romantic notions of history, imagination, literary theory, melancholy, affect, love, revolution, community, and other central themes that Blanchot's writings deploy across the century from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jean-Luc Nancy. This book contains contributions in both English and French.

Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genre. Chapters trace the Victorian idyll’s emergence in the 1830s, its flourishing in the 1860s, and its evolution up to the century’s close, drawing attention to the radicalism of idyllic experiments with pictorial, photographic, dramatic, literary, and poetic form in the work of canonical and lesser-known figures. Approaching the idyll through three intersecting categories—subject, ecology, and form—this book remaps Victorian culture, reshaping thinking about artistic form in the nineteenth century, and recalibrating accepted chronologies. In the representations by a host of Victorian artists and writers engaging with other-than-human forms, and in the natures of the subjectivities animated by these encounters, we find versions of Victorian ecology providing provocative imaginative material for ecocritics, scholars, writers, and artists today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, English literature, Victorian studies, British history, queer and trans* theory, musicology, and ecocriticism, and will enliven debates pertaining to the environmental across periods.

This famous work was the result of the wartime collaboration of two Scottish scholars. Their tracing of the course of English poetry has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as a 'volume of masterly compression'. They deliberately spend most time on the greatest poets, believing that, significant as traditions and influences are, the great poet himself affects the spirit of his age and moulds the tradition he has inherited. At the same time, enough attention is paid to minor poets to make the book historically complete, and to fill in the most important links in the chain of poetic development. Thus Gower is here, as well as Chaucer; Patmore, as well as Browning. Both in scope and in detail A Critical History of English Poetry is a distinguished and valuable work.

This major study reassesses Adalbert Stifter's work within the context of the tradition of nineteenth-century European fictional prose.