This essay examines the literary interchange between Percy Shelley and John Keats through a comparative reading of their poems, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘To Autumn’, both of which were written in explicit (Shelley) or implicit (Keats) response to the Peterloo Massacre. Drawing special attention to the formal and stylistic differences between these two poets, I argue that each demonstrates a distinctive attitude towards argument. More particularly, I suggest that Keats and Shelley are uniquely interested in the question of whether or not a poem can make a political claim and, more broadly, in the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

The first chapter sets out the stakes of Auerbach’s understanding of Renaissance art by beginning with “The Philology of World Literature” and ending with Henry James’ sentimental tourist in Venice. To be a sentimental tourist is to live an aesthetic life in history, and this chapter uses this point to sketch out a portrait of Auerbach’s work that emerges from a stress on Renaissance.

What is the aesthetic status of these interactions? I am tempted to answer: that is it, aesthetic. The answer to a further question, ’whose aesthetic?’, is implicit in my opening argument. The aesthetic must be dynamic, representing ’not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming’, as Matthew Arnold phrased the human ideal. It must accord with newly recognised possibilities of literature – of any literature – and equally with those long recognised. Above all, if it hopes to illuminate the particular literature in hand, it must be supported by that literature, must not supplant it.

This chapter surveys the condition of Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics in Victorian England. Special emphasis is placed on significant historical, political, aesthetic, and devotional elements of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and how these elements influenced Gerard Manley Hopkins’s life and writing. In particular, the chapter considers how Hopkins’s sacramental vision, cultivated during and following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, profoundly shaped his poetry at the levels of form, feeling, and vision. This chapter therefore examines Roman Catholicism as a transformative vision of everyday life and living, the arts, and vocation for not only Hopkins but also his contemporaries who endured, and subtly resisted if not helped to redress, the social prejudices against and legal exclusions of Roman Catholics throughout the Victorian period.

The chapter recalls and summarizes the principal arguments made in the book.

This chapter introduces the ten complaint episodes in the books of Exodus and Numbers as the primary focus of the book and sets the context and method for reading them. The history of modern biblical scholarship is a history of the pursuit of sources. This book focuses instead on genre as a set of historically grounded aesthetic norms. It proposes that we can best understand the literary history of the wilderness narrative by tracking how these norms change over time as Israel’s political and social circumstances change and its scribes navigate those changes by revising existing texts in order to create new possibilities for meaning. Pursuing the kind of genre history Hermann Gunkel advocated without tying it to existing approaches can yield new readings of these episodes and new insights into the literary history of the Pentateuch (Torah), whether documentary or supplementary. Historical criticism is presented as an exegetical, not an antiquarian, endeavor, one that requires the kind of literarily sensitive close reading typical of so-called synchronic studies of the final form. The genres used will help us situate this literature historically, as will the creative ways in which scribes used them.

On the standard “Wollheimian” reading of Collingwood’s aesthetics, Collingwood held that something is art in the true sense of the word when it involves an act of “expression” – understood in a particular way – on the part of the artist, and that artworks in all art-forms are “ideal” entities that, while externalizable, exist first and foremost in the mind of the expressive artist. I begin by providing a fuller account of the Wollheimian reading. I then survey challenges to and defenses of this reading, identifying residual difficulties confronting anyone who seeks to defend Collingwood. I attempt to resolve these difficulties by developing the idea that we take at face value Collingwood’s (overlooked) claim that the work of art is identical to the expressive activity of the artist rather than being identical to the expressive product of that activity, reading this claim in light of Collingwood’s talk about the painter as one who “paints imaginatively.”

This chapter traces the extant historical literature on the growth and development of party politics in colonial Nigeria. These parties were led by formidable personalities who played an essential role in the formation of national consciousness crucial for the formation of an independent Nigeria. While historians have classified it into four phases, the chapter proposes that the growth of political parties should be analyzed into two generational periods: the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1940s and 1950s. The former period is marked by the promulgation of the Clifford Constitution that led to the creation of the first-ever nationalist parties, such as the Nigerian National Democratic Party and The Lagos Youth Movement which, though claiming nationalist status, was, however, confined to the Lagos area. The latter commenced after the enactment of the Richards Constitution which witnessed the growth of regional political parties such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Northern People’s Congress, and the Action Group all of which espoused ethnic nationalism. By engaging with historical works produced on nationalist movements in colonial Nigeria, the chapter places their value beyond the simplistic teleological development of politics of nationalism in Nigeria.

The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.

Yoon Sun Lee discusses how Enlightenment understandings of race shaped ideas about inheritance, such that property ownership came to be understood in racialized terms and race came to be understood in economic terms. Burke’s and Kant’s writings about heritability thus shed light on the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby, as Lee puts it, “enslaved women of African descent bore children who counted not as population that could inherit things but as property that could be inherited by others, on the basis of a color that had to be ascribed or assumed as the material sign of a legal condition.”