Books in the Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters series

When Lord Byron identified the periodical industry as the "Literary Lower Empire," he registered the cultural clout that periodicals had accumulated by positioning themselves as both the predominant purveyors of scientific, economic, and social information and the arbiters of literary and artistic taste.

Romantic Diasporasexamines exile in the Romantic period fromthe different perspectives of French emigres in England, British convicts transported to Australia, and Jews in their perennial diaspora.

This is the first book-length study to read the "Ancient Mariner" as "poetry," in Coleridge's own particular sense of the word. Using a combination of close reading and broad historical considerations, reception theory, and book history, Mays surveys the poem's continuing life in illustrated editions and educational textbooks;

Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870) was a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, travel writer, historian, and artist. Here, Broom Saunders provides a wealth of extracts from her diverse writings, a rich source of information about the pioneering career of a professional woman writer, and insight into a nineteenth-century writing life.

Coleridge has been perceived as the youthful author of a few brilliant poems. This study argues that his poetry is actually a continuous process of experimentation and provides a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar poems, as well as the relation between Coleridge's poetry and philosophical thinking.

British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, and Thackeray, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. Using a number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - Schmid paints a vivid picture of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s.

An emblematic figure of the 'bourgeois century,' the parvenu represents the Other on which a society depends. This drama of exclusion is symptomatic of nineteenth-century society: ambivalent about social mobility, oscillating between a new sense of opportunity for all and a backward-looking retrenchment to rigid social structures.

In Robert Southey , Andrews argues that Robert Southey's denunciation of global Catholicism is essential to understanding his life, works, and times. On this issue, Southey was absolutely consistent in all his work and the Poet Laureate's partisan rhetoric reveals much about the religious culture of this stormy period in England.

Sublime Coleridge focuses on the role of the Opus Maximum in explaining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime. This book is an introduction, a reader's guide, and an interpretation of this central text in British Romanticism.

Known as the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge's manuscripts, letters, and other writings reveal an original thinker in dialogue with major literary and cultural figures of nineteenth-century England. Here, her writings on beauty, education, and faith uncover aspects of Romantic and Victorian literature, philosophy, and theology.

In this book, Judith Thompson restores a powerful but long-suppressed voice to our understanding of British Romanticism. Drawing on newly discovered archives, this book offers the first full-length study of the poetry of John Thelwallas well as his partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.

This book explores Sara Coleridge's critical intelligence and theoretical reach. It shows her in various critical guises: editing works by her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting on her own poetry and prose, and writing diversely brilliant criticism of classical and English literature.

Discusses crucial moments in the historical development of natural theology in England from the time of Francis Bacon to that of Charles Darwin. While the argument from design remains the rhetorical method of choice for natural theologians throughout the three centuries in question, the locus and object of design undergo a change.

From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

Describing Jewish representation by Jews and Gentiles in the British Romantic era from the Old Bailey courtroom and popular songs to novels, poetry, and political pamphlets, Scrivener integrates popular culture with belletristic writing to explore the wildly varying treatments of stereotypical Jewish figures.

The first study of the productions of the minor theatres, how they were adapted to appeal to the local patrons and the audiences who worked and lived in these communities.

Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel .

Examining chameleonic identities as seen in theatrical performances and literary texts during the Romantic period, this study explores cultural attitudes toward imposture and how it reveals important and much-debated issues about this time period. Brewer shows chameleonism evoked anxieties about both social instability and British selfhood.

This comprehensive study ranges from Irving's Knickerbockers, Emerson's Transcendentalists, and Garrison's abolitionists to the popular serial fiction writers for Robert Bonner's New York Ledger to unearth surprising convergences between such seemingly disparate circles.

Through the consideration of canonical authors such as Blake, Scott, and Wordsworth and of lesser-studied works such as radical press writings and popular drama, this study explores the imaginative appeal of the social structures and literary forms of the Middle Ages, and how they raised awareness of Britain's tradition of freedom.

Nichols chronicles the Enlightenment view of 'Nature' as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic 'nature' characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship, he draws new conclusions about 21st-century ideas of nature.

Once celebrated as 'the English Sappho,' Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, a professional writer, a formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s.

Thomas Brennan finds roots of the 'sensibility of trauma' by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses - the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.

In this text nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. Richard Sha, Denise Gigante, and Anya Taylor, among others, make a timely contribution to recent debates about issues of pleasure, taste, and appetite by looking anew at the work of figures such as Byron, Coleridge, and Austen.

Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries.

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

This text explores the reception of the royal family during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its representation in fiction, poetry, and the popular press. Samuelian finds that popular response to the royal family has reflected the public's belief in their right of access to the private life of royalty.

The book offers readings of discourses about food in a wide range of sources, from canonical Victorian novels by authors such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and Amendment Acts.

From Song to Print is a study of the major cultural transition from oral forms of art and discourse to the commercial culture of print that happened during the Industrial Revolution.