Books in the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series

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'.

This study of correspondence in the Romantic period calls into question the common notion that letters are a particularly 'romantic', personal, and ultimately feminine form of writing.

In this study, Mark Parker proposes that literary magazines should be an object of study in their own right. He argues that magazines such as the London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine, offered an innovative and collaborative space for writers and their work - indeed, magazines became one of the pre-eminent literary forms of the 1820s and 1830s. Examining the dynamic relationship between literature and culture which evolved within this context, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism claims that writing in such a setting enters into a variety of alliances with other contributions and with ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning. The book provides an extended treatment of Lamb's Elia Essays, Hazlitt's Table-Talk Essays, Noctes Ambrosianae, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in their original contexts, and should be of interest to scholars of cultural and literary studies as well as Romanticists.

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the 'minor' author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon.

Gary Dyer breaks new ground by surveying and interpreting hundreds of satirical poems and prose narratives published in Britain during the Romantic period. He shows that satire was a major and widely read genre, and includes a bibliography of more than 700 volumes containing satirical verses.

Caroline Gonda offers the first full-length, historically based study of the relationship between fathers and daughters in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction. She draws on a wide variety of literary and non-literary materials, and examines the role of the domestic novel in maintaining familial and social order.

Close investigation of the Romantics' view of literary history reveals that Romanticism defined itself by reconfiguring its literary past. Robert J. Griffin traces the genesis and transmission of 'romantic literary history', questioning many basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.

A defining feature of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterization of the self in terms of psychological depth. Many writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way. Romantic Identities broadens our perceptions of Romanticism by exploring Romantic writing that challenges the 'depth' model.

Reading Wordsworth - and Rousseau before him - from the perspective of recent debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the 'negative freedom' at the heart of liberalism.

How and why has allegory survived, despite the Romantic critique of it as an outdated and artificial literary mode? This wide-ranging 1997 study of allegory in theory and literary practice from the late Renaissance to the present day argues that Romanticism represented the pivotal moment in allegory's survival.

Tuite's study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen's writing, including juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen's posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period.

British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. In this 2006 book, Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its continuing influence today.

In England in the second half of the eighteenth century an unprecedented amount of writing urged kindness to animals: from sermons and encyclopedias to the work of the great Romantic poets. Romanticism and Animal Rights shows how English Romantic writing took up issues of what we now call animal rights.

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.

Print Politics was the first literary study of the culture of the popular radical movement for parliamentary reform in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Kevin Gilmartin explores the styles and strategies of radical opposition in the periodical press and in the public culture of the time.

This book, published in 2000, examines the relationship between British Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane offers original readings of major works in the Romantic canon, focusing on their engagement with the philosophical, political and anthropological writing of pre-eminent theorists such as Malthus, Godwin, Burke and others.

Canuel examines the way that Romantic poets, novelists and political writers criticized the traditional grounding of British political unity in religious conformity. Canuel shows how Romantic writers including Bentham, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Byron saw their works as political and literary commentaries on the extent and limits of religious toleration.

In this 1995 book, John Wyatt explores the relationship between literary history and science, through study of the friendship between Wordsworth and a group of scientists in the formative years of the new science of geology, and challenges the simplistic opposition between Romantic-literary and scientific-materialist cultures.

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.