Coleridge's usual use of opium was through laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. This thesis presents the history of and criticism regarding the poet's use of laudanum and the physical and emotional consequences the drug held for him and his writing career.

Alchemical imagery and ideology is present in many Romantic works of literature, but it has largely been overlooked by literary historians in their contextualization of the time period. The same can be said for mysticism in general, of which alchemy is a subset. This project accounts for alchemy in the works of transcendental philosophers and writers as it contributes to some of the most important conversations of the Romantic time period, particularly the reaction against empirical philosophy and the articulation of creative processes. The transcendental conversation is a transnational one, encompassing Germany, Britain, and America, with its use of alchemy also following this transnational progression. The German idealists developed an epistemology that took from alchemical precepts that in turn informed their spiritual models of genius and the creative process. German idealism largely influenced Romantic conceptions of art and creativity, which then contributed to the Romantic ideal of a poet-prophet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Nathaniel Hawthorne further developed their own models of the creative process by incorporating alchemy as an image of the transformation from vision into art. I examine Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" for their alchemical imagery that articulates such a genius ideal. I also found, however, that these two Romantic works express an awareness of artistic limitations and frustration in the face of this ideal, which illustrates the ambiguity these two writers are known for. But alchemy, as a discourse of contradictions and their negotiation, is a site that accommodates the tension between a posited ideal and the reality of actual experience. As such, alchemy, as an underlying ideology to the poet-prophet, allows for flexibility in an artist's identity. Furthermore, as a deeply personal philosophy of transformation, alchemy's image as a work of art suggests the artist's personal investment in the creative process, which is necessary to art's viability in an increasingly materialistic world.

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This thesis reassesses the evidence surrounding Edward Irving’s controversial teaching about the doctrine of the incarnation. Irving was a controversial figure in his own day and his legacy has been contested ever since he was dismissed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for teaching that Christ had a ‘fallen’ human nature. This thesis re-examines the emergence and significance of Irving’s teaching. It evaluates the scholarly consensus that his distinctive Christology was a stable feature of his thought and argues the case that his thinking in this area did change significantly. Methodologically, this thesis draws on some aspects of Quentin Skinner’s work in the importance of context (Chapter Two) to understand Irving as he really was, rather than in terms of his later significance. In the light of this, Irving’s biography is examined in Chapter Three, before moving into a discussion of the influential part played by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Irving’s intellectual development (Chapter Four). The second half of the thesis then moves on to consider the development of Irving’s Christology and the questions surrounding its provenance and development (Chapters Five and Six). Finally, in Chapter Seven, possible sources of explanation for Irving’s distinctive ideas about the Incarnation are exhibited and assessed. The argument of this thesis is that Edward Irving developed an account of the Incarnation that was essentially novel, in response to the Romantic ideas that he had derived from Coleridge. In accordance with Coleridge’s assessment, it is argued that this derivation was rendered more complex by Irving’s incomplete apprehension of Coleridge’s underlying philosophy. Nonetheless, it is argued that Edward Irving’s teaching presented a Romantic version of Christ, and that this distinctive conception owes more to the times in which Irving lived than to the theological tradition to which he claimed adherence.

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield impressive insights into the timeliness of her fiction, they haven't fully addressed Austen's participation in some of the most crucial literary debates of her time. Thus, it is my intention in this essay to extend the discussion of Austen as a Romantic to her participation in Romantic-era debates over emergent literary categories of authorship and realism. I argue that we can best contextualize Austen by examining how her model of authorship differs from those that surfaced in literary conversations of the time, particularly those relating to the high Romantic myth of the solitary genius. Likewise, as questions of solitary authorship often overlap with discussions of realism and romance in literature, it is important to reexamine how Austen responds to these categories, particularly in the context of a strictly Romantic engagement with these terms. I find that, though Austen's writing has long been implicated in the emergence of realism in literature, little has been written to link this impulse to the earlier emergence of Romantic-era categories of authorship and literary creativity. I contend that Austen's self-projection (as both an author and realist) engages with Romantic-era literary debates over these categories; likewise, I argue that her response to these emergent concerns is more complex and nuanced than has heretofore been accounted for in literary scholarship.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.

The relationship between the Bible and literature is long-standing and has received increasing attention in recent years. This project investigates the interface between the Bible and literature by focusing on the genre of “parable”. The influence of the Bible on Western literature is considerable, and yet in the case of George MacDonald’s writing it is often overlooked. The “parabolic” is a helpful way to focus our discussion as it is an important genre both in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and more subtly in MacDonald’s fantasy and fairytale writing. It is remarkable that approximately a third of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God comes in the form of parabolic speech. Rather than serving as a nice illustrative story to a theological point made elsewhere, the actual form of parabolic speech is crucial for the message it seeks to convey. Form and content work together in Jesus’ parables in a unique way to break open the reality depicted in parable. This thesis attempts to investigate a specifically biblical view of “parable” for understanding certain aspects of MacDonald’s fantasy literature. MacDonald developed a decidedly theological understanding of story as having the capacity to refresh the revelatory nature of Scripture. It is by the imagination that a poet is able to find new forms to recast and recover old and forgotten truths. By designating the poet as a finder rather than a maker, MacDonald resists Coleridge’s idealist inclinations to elevate the poet to a creator. His employment of story and more particularly the “parabolic” is then not only an aesthetic but also a theological choice. MacDonald’s last fantasy romance, Lilith, will serve as our test case to demonstrate this. Considering the “parabolic” in Lilith sheds significant light on the meaning of Lilith and offers up a decisive answer to the important question of whether MacDonald moves in his fantasy and fairytales from a decidedly Christian perspective to a more polyvalent view of reality. This argument shall be further substantiated by bringing to the light the important influence of Novalis on Lilith.

Scholars and storytellers alike have deemed George MacDonald a great mythopoeic writer, an exemplar of the art. Examination of this accolade by those who first applied it to him proves it profoundly theological: for them a mythopoeic tale was a relational medium through which transformation might occur, transcending boundaries of time and space. The implications challenge much contemporary critical study of MacDonald, for they demand that his literary life and his theological life cannot be divorced if either is to be adequately assessed. Yet they prove consistent with the critical methodology MacDonald himself models and promotes. Utilizing MacDonald’s relational methodology evinces his intentional facilitating of Mythopoesis. It also reveals how oversights have impeded critical readings both of MacDonald’s writing and of his character. It evokes a redressing of MacDonald’s relationship with his Scottish cultural, theological, and familial environment – of how his writing is a response that rises out of these, rather than, as has so often been asserted, a mere reaction against them. Consequently it becomes evident that key relationships, both literary and personal, have been neglected in MacDonald scholarship – relationships that confirm MacDonald’s convictions and inform his writing, and the examination of which restores his identity as a literature scholar. Of particular relational import in this reassessment is A.J. Scott, a Scottish visionary intentionally chosen by MacDonald to mentor him in a holistic Weltanschauung. Little has been written on Scott, yet not only was he MacDonald’s prime influence in adulthood, but he forged the literary vocation that became MacDonald’s own. Previously unexamined personal and textual engagement with John Ruskin enables entirely new readings of standard MacDonald texts, as does the textual engagement with Matthew Arnold and F.D. Maurice. These close readings, informed by the established context, demonstrate MacDonald’s emergence, practice, and intent as a mythopoeic writer.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.

A presente tese carrega o ônus de afirmar a relevância dos textos de Henry David Thoreau para a filosofia moral. Duas estratégias paralelas foram utilizadas para cumprir a tarefa. A primeira consiste na discussão pormenorizada de um conjunto de autores que apresentaram para Thoreau diferentes visões sobre a moralidade e o papel da filosofia na tecitura de uma vida digna de ser vivida: o Unitarismo de William Ellery Channing, as doutrinas do Scottish Common Sense de Dugald Stewart e Thomas Reid, o utilitarismo teológico de William Paley, o intuicionismo racional dos Platonistas de Cambridge (representados aqui por Ralph Cudworth), Orestes Brownson e Ralph Waldo Emerson – dois dos principais nomes do Transcendentalismo da Nova Inglaterra e Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin e Thomas Carlyle – primeiros intérpretes do Idealismo Alemão para o mundo de língua inglesa. A segunda estratégia articula a reação de Thoreau a essas diferentes posições sobre a moralidade, mostrando como, a partir dessa reação, ele foi capaz de formular um exercício de pensamento moral, cristalizado, emblematicamente, na escritura de Walden. O conceito de “identidade ficcional” foi pensado para capturar as diferentes técnicas utilizadas nesse exercício. / The present thesis carries the burden of asserting the relevance of Henry David Thoreau´s texts for moral philosophy. Two parallel strategies have been used to complete the task. The first is a thorough discussion of a group of authors who presented to Thoreau different views on morality and the role of philosophy in the weaving of a life worthy of being lived: William Ellery Channing´s Unitarianism, the doctrines of the Scottish Common Sense - Dugald Stewart and Thomas Reid, William Paley´s theological utilitarianism, rational intuitionism of Cambridge Platonists (represented here by Ralph Cudworth), Orestes Brownson and Ralph Waldo Emerson - two of the leading names of New England Transcendentalism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin and Thomas Carlyle - first interpreters of German Idealism to the English-speaking world. The second strategy articulates Thoreau´s reaction to these different positions on morality, showing how, from this reaction, he was able to formulate an exercise in moral thinking, crystallized, emblematically, in the writing of Walden. The concept of "fictional identity" was designed to capture different techniques used in this exercise.