The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism

Exploring how the concept of the imagination is figured in principal texts of English Romanticism, this book argues that this figuring is an ideological activity that reveals a deep social and political investment. The author examines Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, and shows how their legacy of ideology and imagination is reflected in the novels of George Eliot. For these writers, the imagination is neither a faculty that can be presumed nor one idea among others; it must be theorized and, in Coleridge’s words, ‘instituted’. The author undertakes a critical reconsideration of the articulations between Marxism and deconstruction, countervailing the present historicist mood in Romantic studies and arguing that we can only begin to understand the meaning and nature of ideology by returning to its implication with the imagination in Romantic texts themselves.