History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature

The essays Stephen C. Behrendt assembled for this volume explore some of the ways in which English-Romantic poets and playwrights either mythologized history and its leading figures or, in some cases, deliberately rejected and subverted that myth-making activity. Taken together, the essays offer mutually revealing, mutually refining "lenses" upon one another and upon the literature they assess. In their diversity of viewpoints, they bear out the accuracy of William Blake's observation that "Opposition is True Friendship," while in their philosophical and methodological affinities they attest to the pervasiveness of the Romantic impulse to construct and to demolish myths.