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Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature

Online ISBN:
9781781701096
Print ISBN:
9780719071447
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature

Published:
1 November 2008
Online ISBN:
9781781701096
Print ISBN:
9780719071447
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

This study, which examines a range of canonical and less-well-known writers, is a reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition that surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of a growing materialism. Offering detailed readings of both poetry and prose, the book shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, though without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. It is a re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism.

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