Creating Romanticism

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University, UK. She has published Shelley and Vitality (2005), Romanticism: An Introduction (2007), and has edited The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism (1999), Literature and Science (2008) and co-edited Teaching Romanticism (2010).

"...a fascinating and thoroughly convincing call to re-examine not just "Romanticism and Science" but "Romanticism" itself. If Ruston is correct about the deliberate use of scientific and medical ideas in some of the period's foundational literary texts - and I have every confidence that she is - then Creating Romanticism should find an audience well beyond those of us interested in the science of the day and become required reading for all students of the period." James Robert Allard, Keats-Shelley Journal "...offers a lively, de-centred view of British Romanticism, considered from the multiple vantage points provided by the complex structure of its intellectual and social networks". Noah Heringman, The Keats-Shelly Review 'Ruston's book offers a valuable addition to the long history of research into science in the Romantic era: its strength resides particularly in its grasp of the political sub-texts of the interpretation of scientific ideas in the period, as well as in the accounts of little-discussed texts, and in the importance it rightly accords to Davy.' Edward Larrissy, The BARS Review

• Introduction 1. Mary Wollstonecraft and Nature 2. William Godwin and the Imagination 3. Romantic Creation 4. Humphry Davy and the Sublime 5. Conclusion Bibliography