Romantic Paganism

Romantic Paganism
Author: Suzanne L. Barnett
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319547232

This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the “Satanic School” by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as “Athenian” and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.

John Bell, 1745-1831: A Memoir

John Bell, 1745-1831: A Memoir
Author: Stanley Morison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-11-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521143141

John Bell (1745-1831) was an English publisher. The Dictionary of National Biography has Charles Knight calling Bell a 'mischievous spirit, the very Puck of booksellers'. His 109-volume, literature-for-the-masses Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, which rivalled Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), was published from 1777 to 1783. Each volume cost just six shillings, at a time when similar volumes usually cost many times that. The drawings and illustrations with which Bell adorned his publications influenced later publishers, as did his abandonment of the long S. Most notable, perhaps, was Bell's joint-stock organisation of his publishing company, which defied 'the trade' - at the time, forty dominant publishing companies - in order to establish a monopoly on the best publications. In addition to the immense Poets of Great Britain, Bell also published similar volumes on Shakespeare and the British Theatre, as well as the Sunday newspaper Bell's Weekly Messenger and other periodicals.