Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism
This book is the first systematic study of the creation myth as a Romantic form. In the hands of Blake, the Shelleys, Byron, and Keats, the creation myth became a sophisticated and paradigmatically modern genre, permitting the English Romantics to re-examine and revolutionize the traditional conception of man's nature and origins as it had been embodied in Biblical and classical myths.
Professor Cantor begins by discussing Rousseau's rethinking of human origins in his Second Discourse. By portraying man's development as the result of an accidental concatenation of blind material forces and his own actions, Rousseau undermined the traditional religious orthodoxy which saw man as God's immutable handiwork. Man became instead both creature and creator, and thereby assumed the traditional prerogatives of God. Focusing on Blake's The Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Byron's Cain, and Keat's Hyperion poems, the book explores Romantic myth-makers' dreams of the creator in man remaking the creature into something divine. But as the Romantic creation myth developed, a dark side to human creativity began to emerge, reflected in the nightmare vision of Frankenstein and revealed in the loneliness and tragic suffering of the isolated creative ego in Cain and the Hyperion poems.
Paul Cantor has written a facinating case study in the interrelation of philosophy and literature. Revealing the range, depth, and complexity of Romantic myth-making, his book will be essential reading for all serious students of English Romantic literature.