Description
· This book is the first (and only) comprehensive study of Robert Pollok’s bestselling epic The Course of Time undertaken in the modern era.
· The book breaks ground in exploring the reasons for the poem’s immense popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century and its precipitious decline thereafter.
· The book sheds new light on nineteenth-century debates about the relationship between religion and literature and the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological expression.
· In exploring the poem’s reception history, the book offers new insights into the relationship between religion and wider culture and religion and secularization in nineteenth-century Britain and America.
· The study affirms the important, but often overlooked, role that religion played in Scottish Romantic literature.
· The study looks at Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time as a case study for the importance of religion in Scottish Romantic literature and the role that literature played in the struggle between religion and secularism.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Robert Pollok and the Contexts of The Course of Time
Summary of The Course of Time
Note on Language
Chapter 1: Miltonic Theodicy in the Romantic Age
Chapter 2: Epic Correspondences: How Pollok Used Milton
Chapter 3: Sources of Inspiration: Byron, John Dick, Edward Irving and old Mortality
Chapter 4: The Poem a Sermon: Religion and Moral Portraiture in The Course of Time
Chapter 5: Sharpening Weapons at the Forge of Byron: Romanticism and Apocalypticism in The Course of Time
Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of a Christian Epic
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
