Books in the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series

Ian Haywood explores the 'Golden Age' of caricature through the close reading of key, iconic prints by artists including James Gillray, George and Robert Cruikshank, and Thomas Rowlandson. This approach both illuminates the visual and ideological complexity of graphic satire and demonstrates how this art form transformed Romantic-era politics into a unique and compelling spectacle of corruption, monstrosity and resistance. New light is cast on major Romantic controversies including the 'revolution debate' of the 1790s, the impact of Thomas Paine's 'infidel' Age of Reason, the introduction of paper money and the resulting explosion of executions for forgery, the propaganda campaign against Napoleon, the revolution in Spain, the Peterloo massacre, the Queen Caroline scandal, and the Reform Bill crisis. Overall, the volume offers important new insights into the relationship between art, satire and politics in a key period of history.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the essay 'On Life' (1819), stated 'We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life'. Ross Wilson uses this statement as a starting point to explore Shelley's fundamental beliefs about life and the significance of poetry. Drawing on a wide range of Shelley's own writing and on philosophical thinking from Plato to the present, this book offers a timely intervention in the debate about what Romantic poets understood by 'life'. For Shelley, it demonstrates poetry is emphatically 'living melody', which stands in resolute contrast to a world in which life does not live. Wilson argues that Shelley's concern with the opposition between 'living' and 'the apprehension of life' is fundamental to his work and lies at the heart of Romantic-era thought.

Shelley's drafts and notebooks, which have recently been published for the first time, are very revealing about the creative processes behind his poems, and show - through illustrations and doodles - an unexpectedly vivid visual imagination which contributed greatly to the effect of his poetry. Shelley's Visual Imagination analyzes both verbal script and visual sketches in his manuscripts to interpret the lively personifications of concepts such as 'Liberty', 'Anarchy', or 'Life' in his completed poems. Challenging the persistent assumption that Shelley's poetry in particular, and Romantic poetry more generally, reject the visual for expressive voice or music, this first full-length study of the drafts and notebooks combines criticism with a focus upon bibliographic codes and iconic pages. The product of years of close examination of these remarkable texts, this much-anticipated book will be of great value for all students of Shelley and all those interested in the Romantic process of creation.

Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature and examining Cockneyism as a link between the works of Keats and the early works of Dickens.

This book is a history and theory of British poetry between 1760 and 1830, focussing on the relationship between Romantic poetry and the production, circulation and textuality of ballads. It shows how Romantic poetry was powerfully shaped by oral modes of poetic construction.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley all wrote tragedies in response to the turbulent political and intellectual climate in Britain, during and after the French Revolution. Unveiling the remarkable artistry of these mostly unperformed plays, this book examines the playwrights' hostility to royalist Britain as well as their relations with each other.

This book offers a persuasive account of how new ideas of infancy and childhood shaped literary culture in the Romantic period and gave Romantic writers new ways of understanding history and different literary forms.

This study traces the ways in which Romantic writers responded to a debate over the dangers and rewards of idle contemplation, and examines the resulting growth of a 'British idealism'.

This book explores the ways that authors responded to a sense of unprecedented cultural and technological change. Together, their interventions helped to shape the values and tensions that informed Britain's sense of its own extraordinary modernity. Their insights have never been more pertinent.

A new cultural history of the Irish Romantic novel in the turbulent decades of the 1790s-1820s. Drawing on rich archives of history and fiction, Claire Connolly presents new interpretations of the novels and explores important links between fiction and politics at this formative period of Irish history.

What associates fragmentation with Romanticism? In this book, Alexander Regier explains how fracture and fragmentation form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism can be analysed in a particularly effective way. These categories also supply a critical framework for a discussion of fundamental issues concerning language and thought in the period. Over the course of the volume, Regier discusses fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, offering new readings of Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period. He also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man. More generally, Regier's discussion of fragmentation exposes a philosophical problem that lies behind the definition of Romanticism.

John Goodridge examines some of the ways in which John Clare perceived and represented two communities, that of his native village, whose culture, ecology and natural environment it was his life's principal work to record, and the community of poets who inspired him.

In this original and important study, leading scholar Jon Klancher discusses how early nineteenth-century writers and thinkers adopted and transformed Enlightenment ideas of knowledge. His conclusions transform the ways we think about knowledge, both in the Romantic period and in our own.

The ancient conundrum of pleasure came alive in the eighteenth century with a new consideration of its ethical and political significance. This book takes a new critical approach to the philosophy and theory of pleasure and offers an extended reading of this central theme in Wordsworth's poetry and prose.

The instinctive behaviour of crowds is still a mysterious phenomenon. Mary Fairclough discovers that in the Romantic period, writers explained this strange phenomenon using an emotional and medical term, sympathy. Her readings of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Wollstonecraft and others reveal their interest in contemporary political, medical and philosophical discourse.

Angela Esterhammer explores the previously unknown influence of male and female performers who improvised poetry in public during the period 1750-1850. She explores how improvisation contributes to Romantic ideas about genius, gender, and national culture, and traces the representation of poetic improvisers in nineteenth-century fiction.

Convinced that the end of the world was nigh, Romantic women writers assumed the role of the female prophet to sound the alarm before the final curtain fell. Utilizing a wealth of archival material, this book challenges preconceptions of the relations between gender, genre, and literary authority in this period.

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis and their contemporaries.

Focusing on the literary and historical relations between Britain and China during the Romantic period and based on extensive archival investigations, this book shows how British knowledge was constructed from the writings and translations of a diverse range of missionaries, diplomats, travellers, traders, and literary men and women.

In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I am weary of travelling - yet seem to have no home - no resting place to look to - I am strangely cast off'. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers. She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer. Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility's connection with freedom.

Ewan James Jones offers a revisionary account of Coleridge's poetry, challenging the recent critical tendency to view Coleridge's philosophy separately from his poetry. Through close readings of major poems, including Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jones argues that Coleridge engaged most significantly with philosophy through his verse.

Romanticism in the Shadow of War radically reconsiders the conventional understanding of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats, as well as lesser-known writers, by showing how their work developed not only from Romantic writers of the 1790s, but also in response to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years.

Elizabeth A. Bohls presents an interdisciplinary study of non-fictional literature about the colonial Caribbean, 1770-1883. Particular attention is given to the ways in which arguments for and against slavery permeated all sorts of texts, including those overtly concerning language, natural history, geography, aesthetics or domestic life.

Through close readings of major poems, this book examines why the second-generation Romantic poets - Byron, Shelley, and Keats - stage so much of their poetry in Eastern or Orientalized settings. It argues that they do so not only to interrogate their own imaginations, but also as a way of criticizing Europe's growing imperialism. For them the Orient is a projection of Europe's own fears and desires. It is therefore a charged setting in which to explore and contest the limits of the age's aesthetics, politics and culture. Being nearly always self-conscious and ironic, the poets' treatment of the Orient becomes itself a twinned criticism of 'Romantic' egotism and the Orientalism practised by earlier generations. The book goes further to claim that poems like Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Byron's 'Eastern' Tales, or even Keats's Lamia anticipate key issues at stake in postcolonial studies more generally.

Clara Tuite explores Lord Byron's life and work, his public image and the reception of his writings through the idea of scandalous celebrity. Tuite analyses Byron's role in the literary, political and sexual scandals that mark the Regency as a vital period of social transition and emergent celebrity culture.

This fascinating study explores why ideas of the East mattered to Romantic writers, including Byron and the Shelleys, as well as their readers, political reformers and working-class activists. Imagining and invoking the Muslim world helped radicals to formulate their opposition to electoral disenfranchisement, police repression, and economic exploitation in Britain.

A revisionary account, by a leading scholar, of the turbulent decade of the 1790s, during which radical ideas spread to Britain from revolutionary France and were circulated and popularised in new ways. The study offers a general account together with case studies of key individuals of the period. This title is also available as Open Access.

Combining philosophical and historical commentary, as well as close readings of individual works, Mark Offord explores three interconnected aspects of Wordsworth's writings: his interest in travel, his engagement with the concept of 'states of nature', and his attentiveness to the natural and material as a form of language.

The first book to examine how Romantic writers revised and transformed poetic collections to reach new audiences and manipulate their public presence. Far from naive or unworldly, Romantic writers were consciously concerned with the image they portrayed and with questions of authorized repackaging, intellectual property, profit, and loss.

A lively historical and biographical account of the economic crisis of 1811 which brought Britain to the brink of revolution, through analysis of a controversial protest poem by Anna Letitia Barbauld and works by Wordsworth, Coleridge and others. It is essential reading for readers interested in Romantic-era poetry in a political context.