John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism: Re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats

This study bridges the chronological divide between the Romantic era and the first six decades of the 20th century, interpreting John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) as a major, under-recognized contributor to the cultural transmission of Romanticism. Kim Wheatley’s John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism uncovers the surprising extent to which this multi-faceted Modernist-era author reworked key concerns of the Romantic poets.Wheatley shows how Powys’s prose rewritings of Romantic poetry contribute to the story of the posthumous life of Romanticism, especially its environmental legacy.In particular, the book expands our understanding of the early 20th-century reception of William Wordsworth and John Keats. Wheatley argues that Powys anticipates and presciently interrogates recent revisionary critical approaches to the Romantics, primarily materialist eco-critical approaches, and therefore invites a fresh environmentalist criticism open to the transcendental and the supernatural.Ch