Imagined Sovereignties

Abstract

This book argues for a new understanding of the relationship between Romantic conceptions of the imagination and the emergence of modern forms of political sovereignty. Its main thesis is that the Romantics reconceived not just the nature of the aesthetic imagination, but also the conditions in which a particular form of sovereignty could be realized through it. Engaging in close readings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, the book reveals how Romantic authors re-asserted poetic authority in place of divine sovereignty, thereby producing an alternative understanding of the secularization of the political. The book also argues, however, that the Romantics did more than simply replace God as the source of political authority with the subjective imagination; they produced new forms of sovereignty that are no longer modelled on any form of transcendence, divine or human. The book thus aims to re-examine not only our conception of the political significance of Romanticism, but also its continued relevance for our contemporary understanding of the history and development of personal and political sovereignty.