Key Concepts in Romantic Literature

JANE MOORE is Reader in English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, UK. She is an experienced teacher of Romantic women's writing and Romantic poetry and has published widely in these fields, most particularly, Mary Wollstonecraft (1999) and, more recently, The Satires of Thomas Moore (2003). She is co-editor (with Catherine Belsey) of The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, (2nd Edition, 1997).JOHN STRACHAN is Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland, UK. He is the author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (2007) and the editor of many editions of Romantic poetry including British Satire 1785-1840 (2003), the Poems of John Keats: A Sourcebook (2003) and Leigh Hunt's Poetical Works (2003). He is Associate Editor for Romanticism for the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th edition, 2009).

An indispensable introduction to the texts, contexts, and criticisms of British Romanticism. Moore and Strachan have done an exemplary job of demonstrating just why Romanticism has exerted such a powerful influence over English verse and literary criticism for over two hundred years - why Romanticism has been and remains, as M. H. Abrams famously put it, 'one of those terms historians can neither do with nor make do without'. They have thought long and deeply about the subject before them and have here assembled a compelling and beautifully-written overview of a notoriously evasive concept, taking into account both canonical and variant forms of Romanticism, with entries not only on such expected topics as, say, revolutionary politics, the Romantic imagination, and the periodical press, but also on Romantic sexualities, the slave trade, and labouring-class poets. Moreover, they have done so with a precision and an elan that will appeal alike to both postgraduate and undergraduate readers. Key Concepts in Romantic Literature surpasses every other introduction to Romanticism available on the market today. - Professor Charles Mahoney, University of Connecticut, US. With its carefully selected bibliographic references and abundant quotations from primary and secondary sources, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature offers some of the best evidence around that Romantic studies are an exciting territory that constantly promises new discoveries and has not yet finished surprising us. This book represents an extremely welcome new work of reference on Romanticism. In recent decades, the field of Romantic studies has changed beyond recognition, and this book is without doubt the best and handiest guide to navigate our way through it. Students and scholars alike will be grateful to the authors. Moore and Strachan have given us a lively, stimulating and accessible guide, offering their readers an entire cultural phase in all its contradictory variety. What we get here is not just Romanticism as a few aesthetic principles embedded in a few poems. Instead, we get a Romantic age made up of churches and brothels, genteel travellers and daring explorers, politicians and agitators, fashionable women and embattled reviewers, dramatists and novelists, factories and rural vistas, dandies and boxers, atheists and evangelicals. We have here, in manageable form, the whole intricate fabric of an era that gave birth to some of the most exciting literature in the English language tradition and that still looms large over the contemporary imagination. - Professor Diego Saglia, University of Parma, Italy.

• What is Romanticism?'An introductory discussion which clearly addresses the vexed critical question of the nature of Romanticism'Historical Definitions and Conceptualizations of Romanticism'?Discusses the changing manner in which Romanticism has been understood from the late eighteenth century to the present day'CONTEXTS: History, Politics, Culture'Detailed and clearly written accounts of the momentous historical, political and social issues and events which shaped the Romantic period from the French Revolution onwards. After an account of British Politics from 1789 to 1832, subsequent chapters here include 'Empire and Travel', 'Feminism and the Position of Women', 'Industry and Economics', 'Ireland and the 'Catholic Question', 'Medicine and Science', 'Religion and Atheism', 'Sexualities' and 'Slavery, Abolition and African-British Literature''TEXTS: Themes, Issues, Concepts?This section addresses the key themes of Romantic literature, beginning with an account of the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Smith, and Robinson, and a discussion of their successors Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hemans, and Landon. Other chapters include 'Joanna Baillie and Romantic-Era Drama', 'Irish, Scottish and Welsh Poetry', 'Medievalism, the Sublime and the Gothic', 'The Novel' and 'Satire''CRITICISM: Approaches, Theory, Practice'?Discusses criticism of the Romantics from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Chapters include 'Contemporary and Victorian Reception', 'TwentiethCentury Criticism from Modernism to the New Criticism', and 'Modern Critical Approaches'. This last section offers a guide to the critical movements which have transformed Romantic studies from the 1980s in accounts of criticism 'From Deconstruction to PostColonial and Psychoanalytical Criticism', 'From Historicism to Ecological Criticism' and 'Gender Criticism'.