Romanticism & Millenarianism

Expectation of the millennium was widespread in English society at the end of the 18th century. The essays in this volume explore how exactly this expectation shaped, and was shaped by, the literature, art and politics of the period we now call romantic. An expanded and re-historized canon of writers and artists is assembled, a group united by a common tendency to use figurations of the millennium to interrogate and transform the worlds in which they lived and moved. Coleridge, Cowper, Blake, and Byron are placed in new contexts created by research into the artistic and political sub-cultures of radical London, into the religious sects surrounding the Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and into the cultural and political contexts of orientalism and empire.