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.

In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.

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.

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.

Making extensive use of untranslated texts, Arnold Schmidt discusses the impact of Byron's life and works on the discourse of Italian nationalism between 1818 and 1948, his participation in Grand Tour and salon culture, and his influence on Italian Classicists and Romantics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This volume discusses the lives and writings of five nonconformist women who comprised the heart of a vibrant literary circle in England between 1760 and 1840. Whelan shows these women's keen awareness and often radical viewpoints on contemporary issues connected to politics, religion, gender, and the Romantic sensibility.

The Regency Revisited reconfigures Romantic Studies through a neglected timeframe. Other topics include Blake and popular art, Regency science (Humphry Davy), Moore and parlour songs, Cockney writing and Pierce Egan, and Anna Barbauld and the collecting and exhibiting that was so popular an aspect of Regency London.

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.

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the preponderance of food imagery in nineteenth-century literary texts.

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.

Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.

Beginning with the sibling model of Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, and concluding with the intergenerational model presented by the Godwins and the Shelleys, this study traces the conflict and cooperation that developed within and among literary families as they sought to leave their legacies on the English world of letters.

Although people may not realize it, the modern Christmas book market carries on a Victorian legacy. An explosion of Christmas print matter reinvigorated and regularized the holiday during the mid-Victorian period, infusing Christmas with emotionally-charged expectations of reading.

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism is a comprehensive study of the whole run of the monthly periodical Belgravia under the direction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Poetics en Passant presents a 'cross-channel' poetics that redefines the relationship between 'Victorian' and 'modern' poetry by understanding Christina Rossetti's poetics of 'stealth' as an important counterpart to Baudelairean 'shock.'

Gothic Romanticism, winner of the 2010 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, is a study of the relationship between British Romanticism and the Gothic Revival.

Romanticism and the City explores how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature conceptualized urban space. Fresh readings of key texts show how Romantic concerns with urban life shaped both individual works and broad theoretical issues in European Romanticism at large.

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 .

Romantic Dharma maps the emergence of Buddhism into European consciousness during the first half of the nineteenth century, probes the shared ethical and intellectual commitments embedded in Buddhist and Romantic thought, and proposes potential ways by which those insights translate into contemporary critical and pedagogical practices.

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.

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.

This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination.

Romanticism and the City explores how late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature conceptualized urban space. Fresh readings of key texts show how Romantic concerns with urban life shaped both individual works and broad theoretical issues in European Romanticism at large.