Preface
Introduction: Loose Canons
Part One: "Not My Literary History!"
1. High Instincts and Real Presences: Two Romantic Responses to the Death of Beauty
2. Romanticism, Post-Romanticism, and the Afterlife of Cultural Authority
3. The Life of the Dead: Laura Riding and the History of Twentieth-Century Writing
Part Two: Philological Investigations
4. My Kinsman Walter Scott
5. Tennyson and the Artists of the Beautiful
6. Beauty, a (Nineteenth-Century) User's Manual
7. Mr. James and His Discovery
Part Three: Interpretation in a New Key
8. Interpretation as a Game That Must Be Lost
9. Visible Language, Interface, Ivanhoe
Part Four: Humanism for the Twenty-First Century
10. Impossible Fiction; or, The Importance of Being John Cowper Powys
11. Beauty, the Irreal, and the Willing Assumption of Disbelief
Coda: The Scholar's Art
Notes
Works Cited
Index