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"This book deals with the poetics of fancy in the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Fancy is the term paired with imagination in the well-known Romantic poetics, and fancy has always been given a secondary and degraded position under imagination. It sheds a new light on fancy which is expressed positively in Hopkins’ poetics and later becomes the essence of his idiosyncratic concept of “inscape."" All the chapters in this thesis will examine various aspects concerning Hopkins’ poetics of fancy as the basis of his concept of inscape. Chapter 1 discusses the influence of Coleridge and Ruskin on Hopkins’ poetics of fancy. Chapters 2 focuses on the concept of fancy in Hopkins’ predecessors, William Shakespeare and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who influenced him along with Coleridge and Ruskin, making him write the play Floris in Italy and the sonnet series “The Beginning of the End"" in order to experiment with the language of inspiration as fancy. Chapter 3 treats Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism and Catholic art."