This book focuses on the cultural reception of Milton and his works in nineteenth-century America. Using reception theory, the work analyzes the contributions of Milton and his writings to demonstrate how major social movements appropriated him in ways that “reinvent” him, making him what Margaret Fuller called “emphatically American.” The book centers on Milton’s influence on the movements focused on the development of American Christianity, abolition, and women’s suffrage. Each group app...

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism Against...