Romanticism at the End of History

Romanticism at the End of History is a book of remarkable wit, verve, and imagination... Frequently spellbinding and often wonderfully suggestive.

Jerome Christensen, sometime pupil of M. H. Abrams but assiduously conversant in all serious emergent critical idioms, has written a brilliant book as timely and intellectually demanding as one would expect.

How, asks Christensen, can one resist commercialist hegemony in the posthistorical world?... This book bravely and passionately asserts the contemporary relevance of the utopian impulse in 'Romantic' writing without falling prey to its ideological posturing.

[Christensen's] formulation of the Romantics is fascinating, bound up with the future of poetry as well as the way in which we should think about their historical significance. This element of the study is tied to Christensen's stirring concern with the uses to which Romantic texts and Romantic thinking can be put in the twenty-first-century university environment.

Romanticism at the End of History provides a refreshingly new discussion of Romanticism that focuses on the use of Romantic texts and Romantic ideas instead of on their critique... His fresh take on the 'color of imagination' provides new insights into the connection between the lives and works of Wordsworth and Coleridge.