Physical descriptionl viii, 209 p. ; 22 cm. Notes; Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-199) and index. Subject; Carlyle, Thomas 1795-1881.

Carlyle and the Burden of History

Literature & Fiction

Rosenberg, John D.

United States

Harvard University Press

The Darkening Glass

Biographies & Memoirs

Columbia University Press

"Rosenberg aruges that for Carlyle the writing of history was always a double journey- backward in time and downward into self. His substantial achievement is to explore the significance of these connections between self and history and to make his own story of Carlyle's career a compelling one."

History & Criticism

The Idylls of the King is one of the indisputably great long poems in the English language. Yet Tennyson's doom-laden prophecy of the fall of the West has been dismissed as a Victorian-Gothic fairy tale. John D. Rosenberg maintains that no poem of comparable magnitude has been so misread or so maligned in the twentieth century as Tennyson's symbolist masterpiece.  In The Fall of Camelot the author calls into question the modernist orthodoxy that rejects all of Victorian poetry as a Waste Land and ignores the overriding importance of Tennyson to the development of Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and the symbolists. Far from being an escapist medieval charade, the Idylls offers an apocalyptic prevision of the nightmare of modern history. Concealed under the exquisitely romantic surface of the verse is a world of obsessive sensuality and collapsing values that culminates in the "last dim weird battle the West." Perhaps the subtlest anatomy of the failure of ideality in our literature, the Idylls is not only about hazards of mistaking illusion for reality; it dramatically enacts those dangers, ensnaring the reader in the same delusions that maim and destroy the characters.  Rosenberg shows that Tennyson has created a new genre whose true originality criticism has yet to perceive. By employing landscape as a symbolic extension of character, Tennyson obliterates the gap between self and scene and frees himself from bondage to conventional narration.  Throughout the Idylls character cannot be extricated from setting or symbol, and neither has substance apart from the narrative in which it is enmeshed. In essence, the narrative is a sequence of symbols protracted in time, the symbolism a kind of condensed narration.  "Timescape" in the Idylls, like landscape, serves to bind all events of the poem into a continuous present. Arthur is at once a Christ figure and Sun-King whose career parallels that of his kingdom, waxing and waning with the annual cycle. At the heart of Arthur's story lies the dual cycle of his passing and promised return. Incorporating this cycle into its structure, the Idylls is itself a kind of literary second coming of Arthur, a resurrection in Victorian England of the long sequence of Arthuriads extending back before Malory and forward through Spenser, Dryden, Scott, and Tennyson.

The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's Idylls of the King

British & Irish

Belknap Press

No figure among the Victorians surpasses John Ruskin in magnitude of genius, modernity of message, or mastery of prose. Yet for the first half-century after his death in 1900, his genius lay largely undiscovered. First published in 1963, John D. Rosenberg's The Genius of John Ruskin aimed to make Ruskin's ideas and writings accessible to the modern reader, and it quickly became a classic. Long out of print, this important anthology is now available with a new foreword by Herbert F. Tucker and an expanded and updated bibliography by the author that takes into account recent Ruskin scholarship.

Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

Routledge& Kegan Paul

No figure among the Victorians surpasses John Ruskin in magnitude of genius, modernity of message, or mastery of prose. Yet for the first half-century after his death in 1900, his genius lay largely undiscovered. First published in 1963, John D. Rosenberg's The Genius of John Ruskin aimed to make Ruskin's ideas and writings accessible to the modern reader, and it quickly became a classic. Long out of print, this important anthology is now available with a new foreword by Herbert F. Tucker and an expanded and updated bibliography by the author that takes into account recent Ruskin scholarship.

The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

University of Virginia Press

This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.

Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)

Anthem Press

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Books by Rosenberg, John D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rosenberg, John D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Carlyle and the Burden of History

The Darkening Glass

Carlyle and the Burden of History

The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's Idylls of the King

Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)

Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series)