Description
Book SynopsisExamines the political significance of the concept of the imagination in key authors of British Romanticism, specifically Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, and argues that their work presents an alternative understanding of the secularization of the political and of the development of modern political sovereignty.
Trade Review"Imagined Sovereignties has the virtue of recognizing the stunning imbrication of poetry and politics. This is not just another story about aesthetic ideology. Rather, it is a rich and well-researched reflection on the inextricable relation between a political concept (sovereignty) and a poetic practice (imagination) and an argument for the central importance of this relation to our thinking about romanticisms past and present." -- -Sara Guyer University of Wisconsin-Madison "This book contributes powerfully to our understanding of the afterlife of sovereignty in the modern world. By way of remarkably original interpretations of major texts by Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, Kuiken teaches us to understand the Romantic imagination as a reinvention of the concept of the political. Routing the paradox of secular political sovereignty through the imagination, these poets not only underscored the crisis of modern sovereignty, but discovered in that crisis the possibility of moving beyond political theology and imagining new forms of authority and collective identity." -- -Marc Redfield Brown University "From the outset, with its brilliant account of how "Romanticism ... bears witness to a sovereignty that ceases to be itself the moment it is created," the argument of Imagined Sovereignties is elaborated in disarmingly clear, precise, and always rigorously developed terms that will do nothing less than shift the ground of the debate around history and politics in Romanticism." -- -Jan Plug University of Western Ontario
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Toward a New Political Romanticism 1. "Honest Indignation is the Voice of God": Blake and Political Theology 2. The Blind-Spot of Power: Sovereignty and Unconditionality in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and The Friend 3. "To the Great Ends of Liberty and Power": Community and Sovereignty in Wordsworth's Prelude 4. Shelley's Metaleptic Imagination and the Future of Modern Sovereignty Epilogue: "Upping the Ante" Notes Bibliography Index
