The Historical Poem: On the Lives and Afterlives of Romantic Literary Criticism

The Historical Poem takes up Georg Lukács's classic account of the historical novel to tell the forgotten story of its precursors. For eighteenth-century and Romantic thinkers, these were poems from distant times and places—from ancient and medieval India to the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages. Historical poems were said to bring the past to life, to invite their readers into distant worlds. And they were made to answer many of the era's most pressing philosophical questions: the nature o...