“Suzanne Nalbantian’s book is a welcome overview of the soul’s relation to the world of Otherness from early Romanticism to early W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. This is not simply the disembodied history of an idea. Rather, it surveys the kind and quality of the figures through which these poets found their understanding of the de-soul, the transcendental Other, and the relations of those sometimes antagonistic elements as they embraced and finally separated when Romanticism died out. Bits and pieces of perceptions we have about the sense of the soul in the nineteenth century fall into place in a spare, perspicuous, and tightly organized narrative which gives shape to one of the most significant patterns of the century. […] The book takes a special place in the debate about the evolution from Romanticism to Symbolism and beyond, a movement which Suzanne Nalbantian sees as a displacement. She supplies a series of instances from several major literatures, analyzing an evolution which includes Stéphane Mallarmé as well as Joseph von Eichendorff, Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as Jules Laforgue. This broad-ranging approach illustrates the universality of the changes she describes.”

(Description from a review by Frederick Garber)