Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy

Gregory Maertz has written extensively on Romantic and Modern literature, art, and ideas. In these nine related essays, he investigates the expression of Romanticism in literature, philosophy, and cultural politics from the Renaissance to Modernism. The comparative essays in Part One examine the affinity between the religious logic of Sir Thomas Browne and Søren Kierkegaard; Tolstoy’s enduring attraction to Schopenhauer’s thought; Rilke’s debts to the sculptor Rodin; the identification of an early novel by William Godwin as the chief precursor text to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and the corresponding literary projects of Osip Mandelstam, Rilke, and David Jones. In Part T…