Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning

“Mark Sandy’s impressive new study engages rewardingly with Romantic forms of grief in major writers from William Blake to W. B. Yeats. While Sandy’s close readings are alert and sharply observed, his book will also be welcomed for its fresh perspectives on how the Romantics’ bequests of mourning communicated to their Victorian successors. John Keats’s haunted word “Forlorn…” echoes across every page.” – Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews, UK

“Through his rigorous readings, Sandy shows that Romantic poetry is at once interlaced with quixotic dreams of harmony and unity and mournful realizations of loss and mortality, a complicated interplay of conflicting dynamics that profoundly influenced the Victorians and modern consciousness.’ Review of English Studies ’Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning brings together themes which pervade Romantic poetry and scholarship, and in so doing, will appeal to a wide range of academic readership, from literary specialists to students of nineteenth-century culture and philosophy.” – Centre for Medical Humanities

“A beautifully written, critically attuned, and engaging work is Mark Sandy’s Romanticism, Memory and Mourning.’ Year’s Work in English Studies ‘In Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, Mark Sandy skillfully explores the fraught Romantic engagement with ’the inconceivable and unspeakable event of death’ (p. 1) through a poetry of grief and loss … His meticulous engagement with the representation of death, mourning, and loss across genres as disparate as the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the romance, and the ode (a list by no means complete), is complemented by the diverse range of poets he situates his discussions in … The impressive scope of the project does not come at the expense of depth, and Sandy’s insightful close readings offer fresh perspectives on often familiar Romantic texts.”