Books in the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series

In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Richardson breaks new ground in two fields, revealing a significant and undervalued facet of British Romanticism while demonstrating the 'Romantic' character of early neuroscience. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct and intuition, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the era, take on unsuspected valences that transform conventional accounts of Romantic cultural history. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.

This book re-examines Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution and on English Romanticism, through his confessional writings and political theory, and their mediation in the speeches and actions of Robespierre. Gregory Dart shows how the writings of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth and Hazlitt engage with the Jacobin tradition after the Terror.

Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s.

This book addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Ann Radcliffe. As women were cast into the feminine, maternal role in Romantic national discourse, women like these five found themselves exiled - sometimes literally - from the nation.

An original study of debates which arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature and the new class of readers produced by the revolution in information and literacy in eighteenth-century England. Topics debated include the status of the author, working-class activists and radical women authors.

Bolton examines the ways Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics. This well-illustrated 2001 study draws on poetry and personal memoirs, popular drama and parliamentary debates, political caricatures and theatrical reviews to extend current understandings of Romantic theatre, the public sphere, and Romantic gender relations.

This 2002 collection represents twenty-five years of work by Jerome McGann, one of the most important critics of Romanticism and Byron studies. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now McGann's influential work on Byron can be appreciated more widely by new generations of students and scholars.

Travel writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was staple fare in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Elizabeth Bohls examines the ways in which women's travel writing of this period both drew on and challenged the conventions of aesthetic theory.

This book questions the historical reasons for the improbable popularity of supernatural fiction in the Age of Enlightenment, examining Gothic novels in the context of contemporary theatrical ghosts, and drawing out the connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism.

This is the first book to examine the literature of the Romantic period as a conscious attempt to effect the religious transformation of society. Robert Ryan explores the Romantics' participation in the public debate on religion which dominated the period, and shows how their careers are radically reconfigured when viewed in the context of this passionate debate.

Markman Ellis contests the enduring view that the sentimental novel is concerned only with displays of refined feeling. He analyses such fiction's engagement in public controversies of the late eighteenth century: emerging anti-slavery opinion, discourse on the morality of commerce, and the movement to reform prostitution.

This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It looks at the ways in which they were identified with and contested in Romanticism, through original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Scott.

In this 1999 book, Jeffrey N. Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by showing Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron and others working together in the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt known as the 'Cockney School'.

The first investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary poetic, philosophical and scientific debates on the nature of dreaming. It offers a rich historical context for the ways in which the most mysterious workings of the Romantic imagination were explored and understood.

The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, David Duff traces this combination in its literary and political manifestations.

In this first full-length study of Romantic writers' obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte, Simon Bainbridge shows how major poets and essayists constructed, appropriated and contested different Napoleons as part of their sustained and partisan engagement in political and cultural debate.

Helen Thomas's study opens a new avenue for Romantic literary studies by exploring connections with literature produced by slaves, slave owners, abolitionists and radical dissenters between 1770 and 1830. In the first major attempt to relate canonical Romantic texts to the writings of the African diaspora, she investigates English literary Romanticism in the context of a transatlantic culture, and African culture in the context of eighteenth-century Britain. In so doing, the book reveals an intertextual dialogue between two diverse yet equally rich cultural spheres, and their corresponding systems of thought, epistemology and expression. Showing how marginalised slaves and alienated radical dissenters contributed to transatlantic debates over civil and religious liberties, Helen Thomas remaps Romantic literature on this broader canvas of cultural exchanges, geographical migrations and identity-transformation, in the years before and after the abolition of the slave trade.

This book examines the tension between the material, economic pressures motivating poetry as an occupation, and traditional notions defining poetry as an art. It focuses on five writers in the Romantic period: James MacPherson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth.

This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats's major poems, informed by contemporary literary theory. The book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats's poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing a theory of reading for Romantic poetry more generally.

This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre - the Gothic. Michael Gamer offers a sharply focused analysis of how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions whilst, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature, including its institutional and commercial recognition as a form of literature, played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology. In doing so he examines the early history of the Romantic movement and its assumptions about literary value, and the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century. As a whole the book makes an original contribution to our understanding of genre, tracing the impact of reception, marketing and audience on its formation.

M. O. Grenby's book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels. He examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain.

Wordsworth wrote that he longed to compose 'some philosophic Song/Of Truth that cherishes our daily life'. Yet he never finished The Recluse, his long philosophical poem. Simon Jarvis argues that Wordsworth's aspiration to 'philosophic song' is central to his greatness, and changed the way English poetry was written. Some critics see Wordworth as a systematic thinker, while for others he is a poet first, and a thinker only (if at all) second. Jarvis shows instead how essential both philosophy and the 'song' of poetry were to Wordsworth's achievement. Drawing on advanced work in continental philosophy and social theory to address the ideological attacks which have dominated much recent commentary, Jarvis reads Wordsworth's writing both critically and philosophically, to show how Wordsworth thinks through and in verse. This study rethinks the relation between poetry and society itself by analysing the tensions between thinking philosophically and writing poetry.

In this innovative study Alan Richardson argues that transformations in schooling and literacy in Romantic Britain helped shape the provision of literature as we now know it. Topics include definitions of childhood, educational methods and institutions, children's literature, and female education.

This book revises the view of printed ephemera as a trivial or disposable by giving a history of its role in eighteenth-century culture. It explores how tickets, playbills and posters became a way of facilitating social interaction and, for collectors, a means of preserving the evanescence of daily life.

This book explores how the meaning of 'poetic atmosphere' developed within larger ideas of Romanticism, particularly through the poetry of William Wordsworth, who was the first to see its potential as metaphor. Thomas H. Ford here makes a significant contribution to debates in the areas of literary ecology and ecocriticism.

This book provides a historically-nuanced account of anxieties about decline in Romantic-era Britain. Combining close readings of Romantic literary texts with study of works from political economy, historical writing, classical studies, and media history Jonathan Sachs offers, through the lens of decline, a new way of understanding British Romanticism.

Exploring a topic at the intersection of science, philosophy and literature, this book traces the history of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - as a writerly practice, and accounts for mixtures of poetry and prose in the work of major Romantic-period writers.

English Romanticism has long been considered an 'undramatic' and 'anti-theatrical' age, yet Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats all wrote plays. In the Theatre of Romanticism analyses these (and especially Coleridge's) plays, in the context of London theatre at the time, focusing on their constructions of women and nationhood.

In this book, Nigel Leask sets out to study the work of Byron, Shelley and De Quincey (together with a number of other major and minor Romantic writers, including Robert Southey and Tom Moore) in relation to Britain's imperial designs on the 'Orient'.