Exploring the Politics of Transcendentalism in the English Poetry

This book investigates how an evolving concept of transcendentalism in early modem England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding effectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My book focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century – from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640’s – that troubled England’s developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape.