Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts
for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has
been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of
devotion, Romantic Prayer shifts attention to the quintessential
articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a
performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the
tenability and rationality of prayer was much contested, poetry--a
form with its own interlinked history with prayer--was a unique place
to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how
the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic
practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions
of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the
details of prayer's historical position in the Romantic era across a
spread of religious traditions, Romantic Prayer turns to a range of
writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical.
William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to
reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own
denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is analysed
as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer,
culminating in an explicit 'philosophy' of prayer; William
Wordsworth--by contrast--keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance,
continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to
devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord
Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under
the influence of Enlightenment, materialist, and atheist
critiques--what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language
traditionally conceived is becoming impossible to maintain?
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Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773-1832
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192599667
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter