Thomas McFarland
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation.
Princeton University Press, 1981. 0691064377  432 pages.
Volume is bound in dark crimson cloth, with gilt-lettered black spine label. Book is in excellent condition. Dust jacket displays shelfwear, with sunning to spine label.
"Despite their hopeful aspirations to wholeness in life and spirit, Thomas McFarland contends, the Romantics were "ruins amidst ruins," fragments of human existence in a disintegrating world. He sees in the triadic phenomenon of incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin the index of a European culture buckling under an accumulation of religious, political, philosophical, scientific, and literary burdens. Focusing on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Professor McFarland shows how this was true not only for each of these Romantics in particular but also for Romanticism in general."