Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism – serie

This volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the "age of revolutions" (c. 1750 1850), marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceive the fairness of a given legal order and work with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of "epistemic injustice" to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanize the rule of law.

This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the ‘age of revolutions’ from 1750 to 1850 – a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of ‘epistemic injustice’ to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.

Considering her transformation of material from the works of European writers and orators such as Rousseau, Mirabeau, 'Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Margareta de Cambon, as well as British sentimental philosophers and the radical theologian Richard Price, this book argues that Wollstonecraft espouses a cosmopolitan ethic that subordinates local and national allegiances to philanthropy, or love of humankind. At a time of international conflict, burgeoning capitalism and colonial enterprise, she represents philanthropy and cultural authenticity as the means to resist tyranny and imperialism in all their forms and light the way to global justice.

Considering her transformation of material from the works of European writers and orators such as Rousseau, Mirabeau, Felicite de Genlis, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Margareta de Cambon, as well as British sentimental philosophers and the radical theologian Richard Price, this book argues that Wollstonecraft espouses a cosmopolitan ethic that subordinates local and national allegiances to philanthropy, or love of humankind. At a time of international conflict, burgeoning capitalism and colonial enterprise, she represents philanthropy and cultural authenticity as the means to resist tyranny and imperialism in all their forms and light the way to global justice.

Women's writing was a crucial part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period, yet has not often been seen as part of that history. This collection shows how women writers fit into a tradition of Romanticism that recognizes transgressive sexuality as a defining feature. Building on recent research on the period's sexual culture, it shows how women writers were theorizing perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives. In doing so, the collection also challenges current understandings of 'transgression' as a sexual category.

Women's writing was a crucial part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period, yet has not often been seen as part of that history. This collection shows how women writers fit into a tradition of Romanticism that recognizes transgressive sexuality as a defining feature. Building on recent research on the period's sexual culture, it shows how women writers were theorizing perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives. In doing so, the collection also challenges current understandings of 'transgression' as a sexual category.

Confronts the racial and ethnic logics of the Oriental subject undergirding the development of Romantic poeticsDemonstrates how the construction of the modern lyric subject germinated during the Romantic period through the creation and invention of the Oriental subjectIt analyses works by Romantic-era authors, including William Jones, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, William Blake and Phillis WheatleyUses the concepts of orientations and Orient to provide fresh readings of British Romantic poetryWhat happens when we redirect our lines of reading along new lines, borders, and orientations those that fail to fit neatly into the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West? What is, who stands for, and where exactly is the Orient" in British Romantic poetry? To where does the "Orient" lead? Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation responds by tracing shifting orientations cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered through Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings. Kim coins the term "poetics of orientation" to describe a poetics newly aware of cultural difference as a site of aesthetic contestation. She focuses on the contestation that occurs at the site of the lyric subject. A "poetics of orientation", rather than situating the lyric subject in assumed racial whiteness, repositions the lyric subject within discussions of Orientalism and racial formation, tracing the white supremacist logics that have for too long been dismissed as inessential or nonconsequential to Romantic studies."

What happens when we redirect our lines of reading along new lines, borders, and orientations those that fail to fit neatly into the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West? What is, who stands for, and where exactly is the "Orient" in British Romantic poetry? To where does the "Orient" lead? Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation responds by tracing shifting orientations cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered through Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings. Kim coins the term "poetics of orientation" to describe a poetics newly aware of cultural difference as a site of aesthetic contestation. She focuses on the contestation that occurs at the site of the lyric subject. A "poetics of orientation", rather than situating the lyric subject in assumed racial whiteness, repositions the lyric subject within discussions of Orientalism and racial formation, tracing the white supremacist logics that have for too long been dismissed as inessential or nonconsequential to Romantic studies.

Contesting Cosmopolitan Moments in the Long Eighteenth Century traces expansions of Classical cosmopolitanism in long-eighteenth-century Britain to shows how acts of inclusion from cosmopolitan viewpoints sought to cope with British imperialism, war, social injustice, slavery, and technologies of self- and societal improvement, concerns that survive to this day. The Classical inheritance uncovered here yields more precise contouring of cosmopolitanism and of the eighteenth-century innovations that prefigure postcolonial debates. Additionally, considerations of style fill a lacuna in eighteenth-century literary studies, where cosmopolitanism remains a rather under-explored hermeneutical tool. Inviting readers to appreciate cosmopolitanism as a developing rather than as a static and completed philosophy, this study refutes an objection that circulated in the eighteenth century and is still present today, namely, cosmopolitanism's disdain for local values.

Contesting Cosmopolitan Moments in the Long Eighteenth Century traces expansions of Classical cosmopolitanism in long-eighteenth-century Britain to shows how acts of inclusion from cosmopolitan viewpoints sought to cope with British imperialism, war, social injustice, slavery, and technologies of self- and societal improvement, concerns that survive to this day. The Classical inheritance uncovered here yields more precise contouring of cosmopolitanism and of the eighteenth-century innovations that prefigure postcolonial debates. Additionally, considerations of style fill a lacuna in eighteenth-century literary studies, where cosmopolitanism remains a rather under-explored hermeneutical tool. Inviting readers to appreciate cosmopolitanism as a developing rather than as a static and completed philosophy, this study refutes an objection that circulated in the eighteenth century and is still present today, namely, cosmopolitanism’s disdain for local values.

Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower traces the roots and expression of the literary theme of subversive suicide in the British Romantic era through key texts from different genres, from novels to letters, and poems to plays. A range of commentaries on suicide including newspaper reports, coroners' inquests, religious tracts, sermons, medical studies, and legal texts reveals the existence of a distinctly Romantic-era suicide debate, the fervour of which reflects the rise of biopower, as defined by Michel Foucault, to which suicide was the ultimate threat. This debate features a spirited defence of Enlightenment ideas proclaiming the Western liberal subject to be existentially free, as well as the broad cultural influence of the British slave trade, which shaped both national awareness of what it meant to be a subject and the definition of the human at the time

Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower traces the roots and expression of the literary theme of subversive suicide in the British Romantic era through key texts from different genres, from novels to letters, and poems to plays. A range of commentaries on suicide – including newspaper reports, coroners’ inquests, religious tracts, sermons, medical studies, and legal texts – reveals the existence of a distinctly Romantic-era suicide debate, the fervour of which reflects the rise of biopower, as defined by Michel Foucault, to which suicide was the ultimate threat. This debate features a spirited defence of Enlightenment ideas proclaiming the Western liberal subject to be existentially free, as well as the broad cultural influence of the British slave trade, which shaped both national awareness of what it meant to be a subject and the definition of the human at the time

The book argues that literary authors who had initially supported the ideals of the French Revolution, became more coded and elliptical in their writing as a response to surveillance and repression in Britain in the 1790s. It shows that authors appropriated the tools of invisible state surveillance by using coded modes and methods, including pseudonymity, elision, satire, irony, innuendo, allegory and self-censorship, amongst others. These strategies were often used performatively to mock the spy figure and interrogate the encroaching culture of secrecy, silencing and suspicion; but also, as a precautionary measure to protect writers from laws against sedition and treason. Applying surveillance theory, the book provides accessible and illuminating readings of literary works by William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Robinson, Robert Bage, and William Blake.

This book situates Walter Scott's novels on monarchy within both their historical contexts and biopolitical theory, particularly regarding the King's Two Bodies, a notion that, according to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, raises 'the spectre of an absolutism. . .in an abstract physiological fiction.' It attends to Scott's careful calibration of the historical record behind each novel while noting that his reflections on the seismic shifts caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era culminating in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) informs his representations of monarchy in the novels. While each novel's consideration of the rights and limitations of royal prerogatives is deeply grounded in its own historical context, Scott's fiction and the Life demonstrate keen awareness of the nineteenth-century shift to what Michel Foucault calls 'governmentality' that is, the sovereign power's project to control and protect subjects, often through surveillance, policing, and the strategic exercise of mercy.

This book situates Walter Scott’s novels on monarchy within both their historical contexts and biopolitical theory, particularly regarding the King’s Two Bodies, a notion that, according to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, raises ‘the spectre of an absolutism. . .in an abstract physiological fiction.’ It attends to Scott’s careful calibration of the historical record behind each novel while noting that his reflections on the seismic shifts caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era – culminating in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) – informs his representations of monarchy in the novels. While each novel’s consideration of the rights and limitations of royal prerogatives is deeply grounded in its own historical context, Scott’s fiction and the Life demonstrate keen awareness of the nineteenth-century shift to what Michel Foucault calls ‘governmentality’ – that is, the sovereign power’s project to control and protect subjects, often through surveillance, policing, and the strategic exercise of mercy.

This book situates Walter Scott's novels on monarchy within both their historical contexts and biopolitical theory, particularly regarding the King's Two Bodies, a notion that, according to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, raises 'the spectre of an absolutism. . .in an abstract physiological fiction.' It attends to Scott's careful calibration of the historical record behind each novel while noting that his reflections on the seismic shifts caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era - culminating in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) - informs his representations of monarchy in the novels. While each novel's consideration of the rights and limitations of royal prerogatives is deeply grounded in its own historical context, Scott's fiction and the Life demonstrate keen awareness of the nineteenth-century shift to what Michel Foucault calls 'governmentality' - that is, the sovereign power's project to control and protect subjects, often through surveillance, policing, and the strategic exercise of mercy.

This book situates Walter Scott's novels on monarchy within both their historical contexts and biopolitical theory, particularly regarding the King's Two Bodies, a notion that, according to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, raises 'the spectre of an absolutism. . .in an abstract physiological fiction.' It attends to Scott's careful calibration of the historical record behind each novel while noting that his reflections on the seismic shifts caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era - culminating in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) - informs his representations of monarchy in the novels. While each novel's consideration of the rights and limitations of royal prerogatives is deeply grounded in its own historical context, Scott's fiction and the Life demonstrate keen awareness of the nineteenth-century shift to what Michel Foucault calls 'governmentality' - that is, the sovereign power's project to control and protect subjects, often through surveillance, policing, and the strategic exercise of mercy.

Thomas Moore has long been considered Ireland's national bard and the face of colonial grievance in Ireland. But he also grew up in a port city and then travelled with and worked for the British Navy. Dubbing himself 'transatlantic Tom', Moore rode and wrote about the currents of the north Atlantic and coastal locations key to naval operations and trade routes. Following Moore on these lines of motion allows us to trace local and global circuits, including literary networks, agricultural trade, interests in the Atlantic fishery, migration, military activity and the coercions of the slave trade. Powered by water, such motion pulls against the fictions of stable, bounded property necessary to the British Empire and influential in British Romanticism. Moore not only transits Irish Romanticism and British Romanticism: he is also a window onto a sea-level view of the Romantic era.

Engaging with research fields including studies of cultural transfer, reception, transtextuality and adaptation, Lis Moller charts the circulation of ideas and texts popular ballads and literary works inspired by popular balladry between three languages: English, German and Danish. By tracing such exchanges, she challenges the idea that the Romantic-era ballad revival represented an inward turn towards the roots of one's national culture. As an alternative to the national approach, Moller proposes to view the ballad revival as a search for Northern European cultural entanglements. This book therefore contributes to the new trend in Romantic studies, which, moving beyond the mono-national approach, focuses on European Romanticism and explores the interaction of individual Romanticisms across national borders.

Redefines Romantic sociability through a reading of social contract theoryThe Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement’s coherence in contract theory’s definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century. Key Features Develops new understanding of Romanticism as political movementOffers fresh readings of canonical works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Shelley and Carlyle by tracing their implicit dialogue with the political philosophy of Rousseau and other Enlightenment political theoristsShows that the philosophical routes of Romanticism and its ties to German Idealism originate in empiricism Carries important consequences for the contemporary understanding of the self, an understanding that is partly rooted in notions that originated with the Romantics

Redefines the British historical novel as a key site in the construction of British national identityThe British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as ‘land of liberty’ and it positions Scott in relation to this tradition.Key FeaturesRecovers the richness of the historical novel and history writing before Walter Scott, including the contribution of women writers to this debateExplores how historical fiction probes anxieties at the rise of commerce, the question of empire, and radical political changeRewrites our understanding of Scott and his relation to the earlier British historical novel

The first major study of the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and medical cultureIn the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, Megan Coyer’s book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. Key FeaturesDescribes a distinctive Scottish medical culture of the Romantic-era and its synergistic relationship with literary cultureAdvances our understanding of the medical content of key periodicals of the nineteenth centuryDraws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim several previously neglected medico-literary figuresExamines the ideological roots of nineteenth-century popular medical writingCase Studies Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh ReviewThe Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late PhysicianThe Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson

Examines dissident conceptions of space in the British Romantic eraRadical Romantics is about utopias and failed utopias, about cities that are palimpsests, and about the unwieldy span of the ocean. From William Blake’s visionary poetry to Lord Byron’s Eastern romances, from prophetic pamphlets to travel narratives, texts of the Romantic era make use of imaginative spaces to reveal the contours and limits of territorial sovereignty. In doing so, they raise fundamental questions about our understanding of both territorial and imagined space. What are the means by which people can conceive of geographical space without resorting to the terms of nationalism? Is it possible to imagine a space beyond territory, as movement itself? How can we articulate the overlap between mapped and lived space? Key Features Engages with the critical frameworks of cultural geography, cartography, and the burgeoning field of oceanic studiesReformulates theories of colonization and empire in the Romantic periodPuts canonical poetry in dialogue with travel tales and prophetic tracts

Traces the history of geological travel writing about Scotland across the historical periods of the Scottish Enlightenment and British Romanticism'Discovering the Footsteps of Time' probes the development of a distinctively Scottish tradition of geological travel writing from the seventeenth to early nineteenth century. The tradition tracks a fertile interaction of scientific and aesthetic themes, mediated through literary techniques, which highlights the emergence of 'Romanticism' as such; a distinctive, recognisable cultural movement of taste and style. Making an important new contribution to our understanding of the 'discovery' and representation of Scotland in the long eighteenth century, the book explores why Scotland's topography has been decisive in the history of geology to such a great extent. Written by a literary academic rather than a geologist, the book is as much concerned with textual strategies and the aesthetic experience of geological discovery as with geology itself.Key FeaturesAdds to our understanding of the 'discovery of Scotland' in the 18th and early 19th century, developing a new account of the literary, aesthetic and geological meanings of 'the land of mountain and flood' in the periodOffers new insights about James Hutton's geological theory by attending to his geological travel writing about Scotland, and also locates Hutton's work within wider geological debates in and about ScotlandBuilds on previous work on the literariness of scientific writing in the 'second scientific revolution'Contributes to research on 'Romantic Scotland' and on the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic scientific travel writing

Restructures and revitalises late Romantic literature as a movement fascinated with competing claims about the reality and knowability of characterThe idea of character that many of us still take for granted whether considered in print as an object of representation, or in life as a congenital 'bias' or an acquirable moral possession is the shared concern of a multidisciplinary debate in reform-era Britain. This book argues for the independent merits of several lesser-known works written in England and Scotland during the 1820s and 1830s, recovering in these works a sustained ideological engagement with the ever-slippery concept of character. 'The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism' studies texts written by contemporary poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, philosophers, phrenologists, sociologists, gossip-mongers and anonymous correspondents. Its main authors of interest include David Hume, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Letitia Landon, Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.With a fresh, interdisciplinary approach, this original intervention in Romantic-era scholarship throws character into relief as an especially problematic concept, not only for the poststructuralist critics who study late Romantic writers, but also for the writers themselves. It changes the ways in which literary scholarship has thought about the development of character discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century.Key FeaturesDescribes a synthesis by which debates in many disciplines (novel-writing, periodical-writing, philosophy, phrenology, sociology, medicine, ethics) are distilled into the concept of character associated with literary realismMoves a relatively eclectic group of writers to the forefront of a literary culture traditionally narrowed to focus on Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats and their legaciesEstablishes a more comprehensive understanding of late Romantic literary networks by pairing authors rarely studied together (such as William Hazlitt and Letitia Landon)

Revises established understandings of British women writers’ contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women’s literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of “women’s progress” from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion’s role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women’s literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use “women’s progress” to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.Key FeaturesEstablishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development Uncovers evidence of women writers’ participation in the Scottish Enlightenment’s theorization of sentiment and historical progressProvides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect

Zoe Beenstock examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. Her reading offers a new understanding of canonical accounts of retreat by some of British Romanticism s most dominant voices.