Bøker i Cambridge Studies in Romanticism-serien

For academics, students and general readers interested in how literature intersects with environmental history, a focus on Walter Scott and nineteenth-century writing puts this study in the context of the emerging Anthropocene. Scotland's human and nonhuman land relations along with ecocritical theory provide national and global perspectives.

"A compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of commercial modernity. Through her major works, Wollstonecraft emerges as both political and economic radical, anticipating later Romantics. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--

What was caricature to novelists in the Romantic period? Why does Jane Austen call Mr Dashwood's wife 'a strong caricature of himself'? Why does Mary Shelley describe the body of Frankenstein's creature as 'in proportion', but then 'distorted in its proportions' ¿ and does caricature have anything to do with it? This book answers those questions, shifting our understanding of 'caricature' as a literary-critical term in the decades when 'the English novel' was first defined and canonised as a distinct literary entity. Novels incorporated caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric to tell readers what different realisms purported to show them. Recovering the period's concept of caricature, Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel sheds light on formal realism's self-reflexivity about the 'caricature' of artifice, exaggeration and imagination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

"Matthew Leporati examines the explosive Romantic revival of epic alongside the contemporary revival of missionary activity. His study contributes to charged political debates around British imperialism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--

"Two centuries of sexism obscured Staèel's legacy. John Isbell here restores her reputation as historian, theorist of Romanticism, and Revolutionary, revealing her abolitionist and anti-imperialist commitment. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

The first detailed treatment of Switzerland in British literature and culture from Joseph Addison to John Ruskin, this book analyzes the aesthetic and political uses of what is commonly called the 'Swiss myth' in the parallel development of Romanticism and liberalism. The myth merged the country's legends going back to the Middle Ages with the Enlightenment image of a happy, free nation of alpine shepherds. Its unique combination of conservative, progressive, and radical associations enabled writers before the French Revolution to call for democratic reforms, whereas those coming after could refigure it as a conservative alternative to French liberte. Integrating intellectual history with literary studies, and addressing a wide range of Romantic-period texts and authors, among them Byron, the Shelleys, Hemans, Scott, Coleridge, and, above all, Wordsworth, the book argues that the myth contributed to the liberal idea of the people as a sublime yet sleeping sovereign.

"When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed to its principles, he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed, his geometric training would often structure his observations on religion, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For Coleridge, however, this perspective never competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but, rather, intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry, Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing"--

"In the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again. John Owen Havard is Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University. He is the author of Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830 (2019). His articles and essays on the Byron circle, party politics, political emotion, and the future of democracy have appeared in ELH, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Byron Journal, The New Rambler and Public Books"--

Despite our preconceptions, Romantic writers, artists, and philosophers did not think of honor as an archaic or regressive concept, but as a contemporary, even progressive value that operated as a counterpoint to freedom, a well-known preoccupation of the period's literature. Focusing on texts by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole, this book argues that the revitalization of honor in the first half of the nineteenth century signalled a crisis in the emerging liberal order, one with which we still wrestle today: how can political subjects demand real, materialist forms of dignity in a system dedicated to an abstract, and often impoverished, idea of 'liberty'? Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity presents both a theory and a history of this question in the media of the Black Atlantic, the Jacobin novel, the landscape poem, and the ¿financial¿ romance.

"Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly-revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth's poetry, with such broadly-felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth's old age in relation to his earlier work. Tim Fulford is the author of many books and articles on the literature and history of the Romantic Period (1780-1840), and is the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2022). His monograph Wordsworth's Poetry 1815-45 (2019) won the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Scholarship 2020. His edition The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (co-edited with Sharon Ruston) (2020) won an honourable mention in the MLA biennial Morton N. Cohen Award For A Distinguished Edition Of Letters"--

In this book, Neil Ramsey examines the intellectual contexts of the period in which modern war writing first took shape: the Romantic era. Demonstrating the critical importance of theories of biopolitics in understanding modern war, Ramsey reveals rich and often surprising interconnections between military literature and Romantic culture.

Print and Performance in the 1820s explores a key decade of cultural change, focusing on fiction, periodicals, and theatrical performances in metropolitan centres such as London, Edinburgh, and Paris. Combining literary and cultural studies with media and performance history, it illuminates the importance of the late-Romantic age.

The book uniquely brings together the fields of theater history, print culture, and literature, exploring new contexts around the work of actor Edmund Kean, essayist William Hazlitt, and poet John Keats, and reframing the relationship between theater, essays and poetry in Regency London.

This study of Romantic era London taverns explores metropolitan political and cultural life, focusing on architecture and convivial practice, including drinking songs, toasting practices, Anacreontic poetry and political ballads. It will appeal to literary scholars, historians, musicologists, and anyone interested in the history of the British pub.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean was known as the 'grave of Europeans'. Drawing on a wide range of fictional and non-fictional accounts this book explores the cultural impact of such widespread disease, revealing how literature was crucial to the development and circulation of new medical ideas.

This book offers an original approach to the presence of Continental European literatures in post-Napoleonic Britain. In doing so it reconstructs a literary and cultural environment in which patriotic discourse - the expression of a triumphant international power - combined with intensely transformative engagements with foreign literary traditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry. Close readings of major Romantic poets including Blake and Wordsworth challenge the popular notion of Romantic poetry as hostile to city life demonstrating that a significant discourse on urbanization was emerging during the Romantic period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.