"Enlightenment discourse is generally characterized by an over-identification with favorable aspects of the human psyche and the repression and projection of energies not circumscribed by its sense of selfhood. This psychic split, which associates the immaterial soul with light and the physical body/natural world with darkness, is found in the Enlightenment's positioning of itself against various others - nature, the body, woman, wilderness, irrationality, affect, uncertainty, chaos, the exotic, and the nonwestern - configurations of which are central to eighteenth-century alterity. The Enlightenment, however, did not recognize the other as a psychic projection of itself. Such a realization would not take place until the emergence of Romanticism, a movement that served not as a repudiation of the preceding historical period, as some scholars have argued, but as Enlightenment's dialectical self-correction. Romanticism, as this study will demonstrate in Jungian terms, represents the beginnings of a complex, psychological resolution of the eighteenth century's collective doubling of itself." "The Romantic subjects of this study - Coleridge, Melville, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Whitman, and Wordsworth - not only delineated configurations of the repressed other in their work, but they also presciently anticipated the findings of Jungian depth psychology. In highly psychological narratives, such Romantics illustrated either the tragic effects of refusing re-integration with the other, or they depicted the radical alteration that occurs in consciousness when a psychic projection is recognized, withdrawn, voiced, and integrated. Anglophonic Romanticism thus represented the Enlightenment bringing into consciousness previously repressed and projected, unconscious contents. This process of psychic retrieval can be seen in an intertextual, transatlantic, psychoanalytic analysis of the following Romantic symbols: darkness, the moon and lunar light, the serpent, bodily possession, the circular or thwarted journey, the double, the forest, the syzygy, the quatemity, and the mountain - all of which signify, tragically or not, the western psyche coming to consciousness of its alterity by confronting and/or assimilating its repressed, projected other." --Book Jacket.