Gregory Maertz has written extensively on Romantic and Modern literature art and ideas. In
these nine related essays he investigates the expression of Romanticism in literature
philosophy and cultural politics from the Renaissance to Modernism. The comparative essays in
Part One examine the affinity between the religious logic of Sir Thomas Browne and Søren
Kierkegaard Tolstoy's enduring attraction to Schopenhauer's thought Rilke's debts to the
sculptor Rodin the identification of an early novel by William Godwin as the chief precursor
text to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the corresponding literary projects of Osip Mandelstam
Rilke and David Jones. In Part Two the essays are clustered around the literary activity of
writers and philosophers associated with radicalism in Britain and transcendentalism in
America: a reconsideration of the life of William Godwin the central role played by English
radicals in the transmission of German literature Godwin's innovations in travel fiction and
the crystallization of authorial identity around the influence of Goethe in the work of women
writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft Margaret Fuller and George Eliot.
