In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or "epiphany," in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains how the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the focus from Burke’s and Kant’s prescriptions of natural vastness and grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous spaces, objects and experiences of everyday life. This shift is defined as a descent from mountaintops to an encounter, in William Blake’s terms, with 'a World in a Grain of Sand.' The purpose of this book is to sift the literature of the Romantic everyday, both prose and poetry, canonical and noncanonical, for such grains. In order to define the inherently amorphous and subsumptive sphere called 'everyday life,' the author draws upon two main theoretical threads: the first, based on the phenomenological poetics of Gaston Bachelard, serves to elucidate the depth and diversity of everyday household space; the second, comprising the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, defines the generative potential, what de Certeau glosses as the 'everyday creativity,' of some of the most basic human activities such as walking, reading and washing, to name but a few. The role of the everyday in Romantic literature has in recent years received greater scholarly attention, particularly from critics dissatisfied with the perpetuation of what Karina Williamson characterizes as a 'debased Romanticism which rules there is a category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the rest is ordinary and inadmissible.' The present study serves to map the intersections of these categories of experience and expression—the sublime and the quotidian—and thereby to challenge our assumptions about the aesthetic value of the everyday not only in the Romantic period but also in our own.

First published in 1959 by Chatto & Windus, this much-cited book throws light on the intellectual organization of Coleridge's poetry and the imaginative qualities implicit in his philosophy. John Beer's treatment of the visionary Coleridge is at the same.

The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.

The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.