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This volume, part of the History of Platonism in the Modern Age series, is the first of its kind, offering a comprehensive treatment of the Platonic currents that informed and inspired the English Romantic and American Transcendentalist movements in Britain and the United States over a hundred-year period, from the 1780s to the 1880s. Scholars have long understood that the primary figures of this period – Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau – were Platonic in some sense, although this characterization grew vaguer and more pejorative in the latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, the post-structural turn in the academy often entailed that this affiliation be excised from our understanding of Romanticism. As a result, Platonism was most often employed reductively as a foil for a metaphysics that the Romantics sought to overcome, rather than a rich and complex heritage that helped to shape one of the most fertile artistic and philosophical periods of the modern West.

 

This project will bring together contributors from across a multiplicity of disciplines to produce a systematic resource. It is will be edited by John M. Corrigan (Chengchi) and Alexander JB Hampton (University of Toronto).