Why are there so few 'happily ever afters' in the Romantic-period verse romance? Why do so many poets utilise the romance and its parts to such devastating effect? Why is gender so often the first victim? The Romantic Paradox investigates the prevalence of death in the poetic romances of the Della Cruscans, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Byron, and posits that understanding the romance and its violent tendencies is vital to understanding Romanticism itself.

First published in 1962, this book reveals unexpected complexity or equivocation in Wordsworth’s use of certain key words, particularly ‘image’, ‘form’ and ‘shape’. The author endeavours to show that this complexity is related to the poet’s awareness of the ambiguity of the perceptual process. Numerous passages from The Prelude and other poems are analysed to illustrate the argument and to show that, because of this doubt or hidden perplexity, Wordsworth’s poetry has a far richer texture, is more concentrated, intricately organised and loaded with ambivalent meanings than it would otherwise have been. New light is also shed on Wordsworth’s debt to Akenside.

"The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought - birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. ...Bruckner argues that our new freedoms have brought new burdens and rules - without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desies and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical. Drawing on history, politics, psychology, literature, pop culture, and current events, this book ... exposes and dissects these paradoxes. Bruckner traces the roots of sexual liberation back to the Enlightenment in order to explain love's supreme paradox, epitomized by the 1960s oxymoron of "free love": the tension between freedom, which separates, and love, which attaches. Ashamed that our sex lives fail to live up to such liberated ideals, we have traded neuroses of repression for neuroses of inadequacy, and we overcompensate: "Our parents lied about their morality", Bruckner writes, but "we lie about our immorality." "--Book jacket.

Grace and Luke are among the lucky few who find love early in life. At seventeen, both are equally certain that their love will last a lifetime. But when that love is cut short by forces beyond their control, Grace must answer the question of just how far she is willing to go to get back to Luke. But this is not the typical romantic tale. And just when you think you know where the story is going, you find yourself drawn into a whole new reality, where the fate of an entire world rests upon the choices of this one girl. Prepare to experience the adventure not only through the eyes of these two lovers, but also through the intertwined experiences of a group of remarkable dogs, as Grace's journey becomes so much more than her singular quest to return to the one she loves.

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn’t we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls “sad love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love.

Although primarily known as an eminent historian of Russia, Nicholas Riasanovsky has been a longtime student of European Romanticism. In this book, Riasanovsky offers a refreshing and appealing new interpretation of Romanticism's goals and influence. He searches for the origins of the dazzling vision that made the great early Romantic poets in England and Germany--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel--look at the world in a new way. He stresses that Romanticism was produced only by Western Christian civilization, with its unique view of humankind's relationship to God. The Romantic's frantic and heroic striving after unreachable goals mirrors Christian beliefs in human inability to adequately address God, speak to God, or praise God. Further, Riasanovsky argues that Romantic thought had important political implications, playing a key role in the rise of nationalism in Europe. Offering a historical examination of an area often limited to literary analysis, this book gracefully makes a larger historical statement about the nature and centrality of European Romanticism.