Routledge Studies in Romanticism – serie

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge’s religious identity and argues that while Coleridge’s Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge’s Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge’s search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge’s form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge’s relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

Exploring the rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, this book examines the psychology of Shelley’s anguished poet-Subject. Shelley’s struggles with the fragility of the ‘self’ have largely been seen as the result of thinking which connects emotional hyperstimulation to moral and political undermining of the individual ‘will’. This work takes a different approach, suggesting that Shelley’s insecurities stemmed from anxieties about the nature of aesthetic self-representation. Shame is an appropriate affective marker of such anxiety because it occurs at the cusp between internal and external self-evaluation. Shelley’s reticent poetics transfers an affective sense of shame to the reader and provokes interpretive responsibility. Paying attention to the affective contours of texts, this book presents new readings of Shelley’s major works. These interpretations show that awakening the reader’s ethical discretion creates a constructive dynamic which challenges influential deconstructive readings of the unfinished nature of Shelley’s work and thought.

This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity – a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century – Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency.Jane Austen’s Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen’s ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British press began a campaign of critical abuse against Leigh Hunt, caricaturing the radical journalist as an upstart "Cockney" author whose literary talents were as disreputable as his politics. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was revered as a peer and a poetical genius who, the conservative press argued, would never befriend and collaborate with a writer like Hunt. Yet Byron did just that. Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement is the first full-length study of the friendship and literary relationship of two of the most important second-generation Romantic authors. Challenging long-held critical attitudes, this study shows that Byron and Hunt engaged in a creative and meaningful dialogue at each major stage in their careers, from their earliest published volumes of juvenile poetry and verse satire to their most celebrated contributions to Romantic literature: The Story of Rimini and Don Juan. Drawing upon newly recovered letters and unpublished manuscript material, this book illuminates the surprisingly durable and artistically significant friendship of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt.

The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary explores ways in which England in the Romantic period conceptualized its relation both to its constituent parts within the United Kingdom and to the larger world through discussions of dance, dancing, and dancers, and through theories of dance and performance. As a referent that both engaged and constructed the body—through physical training, anatomization, spectacle and spectatorship, pathology, parody, and sentiment—dance worked to produce an English exceptional body. Discussions of dance in fiction and periodical essays, as well as its visual representation in print culture, were important ways to theorize points of contact as England was investing itself in the world as an economic and imperial power during and after the Revolutionary period. These formulations offer dance as an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in the print culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

Exploring the rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, this book examines the psychology of Shelley’s anguished poet-Subject. Shelley’s struggles with the fragility of the ‘self’ have largely been seen as the result of thinking which connects emotional hyperstimulation to moral and political undermining of the individual ‘will’. This work takes a different approach, suggesting that Shelley’s insecurities stemmed from anxieties about the nature of aesthetic self-representation. Shame is an appropriate affective marker of such anxiety because it occurs at the cusp between internal and external self-evaluation. Shelley’s reticent poetics transfers an affective sense of shame to the reader and provokes interpretive responsibility. Paying attention to the affective contours of texts, this book presents new readings of Shelley’s major works. These interpretations show that awakening the reader’s ethical discretion creates a constructive dynamic which challenges influential deconstructive readings of the unfinished nature of Shelley’s work and thought.

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.

Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.

Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.

From 1809 until just before her death, Jane Austen lived in a small, all-female household at Chawton, where reading aloud was the evening's entertainment and a crucial factor in the way Austen formed and modified her writing. This book looks in detail at Jane Austen's style. It discusses her characteristic abstract vocabulary, her adaptations of Johnsonian syntax and how she came to make her most important contribution to the technique of fiction, free indirect discourse. The book draws extensively on historical sources, especially the work of writers like Johnson, Hugh Blair and Thomas Sheridan, and analyses how Austen negotiated her path between the fundamentally masculine concerns of eighteenth-century prescriptivists and her own situation of a female writer reading her work aloud to a female audience.

Evolutions of Jewish Character in British Fiction: Nor Yet Redeemed builds upon recent scholarship concerning representations of Jews in the British Romantic and Victorian periods. Existing studies identify common trends, or link positive Jewish portrayals to authorial interests and social movements; this volume argues that understanding developments in Jewish portrayals can be enhanced by looking at the way antecedent Jewish characters and tropes are negotiated within developing literary movements. Evolutions of Jewish Character in British Fiction examines how the contradictory nature of Jewish stereotypes, combined with the Jews’ complicated entanglement of religion, race, and nationality, presented an opportunity for writers to think about the gap between representations and individuals. The tension between stereotyping and Realist impulses leads to a diversity of Jewish types, but also to an increasingly muddled sense of Jewish interests. This confusion over Jewish identity generated in turn a subgenre of texts that sought to educate readers about Jews by interrogating stereotypes and thinking about the Jews’ relationships to host cultures. In a literary landscape increasingly defined by individuality and Realism, outcast and secretive Jews provided subjects ready-made to reveal the inadequacies of surfaces for understanding the interior self. The replacement of simplistic Jewish stereotypes with morally complex Jewish characters is an effect both of Realism’s valuation of interiority and of the historical movement towards expanding the definitions of British identity.

Viewing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's pursuit of continental intellectualism through the lens of cosmopolitanism, Maximiliaan van Woudenberg examines the so-called 'German Mania' of the writer in the context of the intellectual history of the university. At a time when the confessional model of Oxbridge precluded a liberal education in England, van Woudenberg argues, Coleridge's pursuit of continental methodologies and networks encountered at the University of Göttingen anticipated the foundation of the modern von Humboldt research-university model. Founded by the Hanoverian rulers of Great Britain, this cosmopolitan institution of knowledge successfully fostered cross-cultural interchange between German and British intellectuals during the latter half of the eighteenth century. van Woudenberg links the origins of Coleridge's engagement with European intellectualism to his first encounter with the innovations of a Reform university during his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1799, a period that many critics and biographers believe spoiled his poetry. Drawing on hitherto unexamined primary records and documents in German Kurrentschrift, this study shows Coleridge to be a visionary whose cross-cultural dissemination of continental intellectualism in England was ahead of its time and presents an intriguing episode in Cosmopolitan Romanticism by a major canonical figure.

The essays in this volume interpret Jane Austen’s fiction through the lens of various sciences of the mind and brain, especially the cluster of disciplines implicated in the term cognitive science, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and others. The field of cognitive literary studies has rapidly developed in the last few decades and achieved the status of an established (if still evolving) critical approach. One of the most popular authors to analyze from this perspective is Jane Austen. As numerous critics have noted, Austen was a keen observer of how the mind operates in its interactions with other minds, both when it functions successfully and when, as often happens, it goes awry, and her perceptions are often in synch with current neuroscientific and psychological research. Despite the widespread recognition of the special congruity between Austen’s novels and cognitive science, however, no book has been devoted to this subject. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind is the first monograph wholly comprised of readings of Austen’s oeuvre (juvenilia as well as all six completed novels) from cognitive and related psychological approaches. In addition, the volume operates under the assumption that cognitive and historicist approaches are compatible, and many essays situate Austen within the climate of ideas during her era as well as in relation to current research in the sciences and social sciences. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind offers a new lens for understanding and illuminating the concerns, techniques, and enduring appeal of Austen’s novels.

Based upon the testimony of Thomas Carlyle, most biographers acknowledge that Wordsworth witnessed the beheading of the journalist Antoine Gorsas in October 1793 during the Reign of Terror. But they go no further. This study reads the Poet’s reactions to the Terror in passages from The Prelude as explicitly about his twenty-three-year-old-self witnessing the gory deaths of Gorsas and others, which caused post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms, exacerbated by guilt for abandoning his French lover and their child a year earlier. Following a chronological arc from October 1793, when the trauma began, until its conclusion in October 1803, when Wordsworth became a poet-soldier, I examine poetic works from The Borderers (1796), the “Discharged Soldier’ (1798), the Two-Part Prelude (1799), Home at Grasmere (1800), and the Liberty sonnets (1803), to follow the Poet working through anxiety, fear, and remorse to a resolution.

This volume expounds the influence of Robert Burns’s reading of Philosophyon his life and work, supplementing this with his personal encounterswith those philosophers he met. The work begins with theHomespun Philosophy of his early years under the tutelage of WilliamBurnes and John Murdoch, then examines in detail some of the texts ofJohn Locke, Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, including other writerswho reflect Hutcheson’s thinking. Further chapters include the explorationon Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison and WilliamGreenfield. Robert Burns and the Philosophers does not purport to be awork of philosophy but rather to show the poet’s reaction to the subjectand the development of his understanding. This work opens up a subjectthat hitherto has been almost unexplored.

American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy. The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.

This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspectives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entanglement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized, just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic, yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from 18th- and 19th-century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Clare, also extending beyond poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such as Jane Austen’s novels, De Quincey’s autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, or Emerson’s essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as "literature" and "philosophy."

This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses and analyzes a specific moment in a writers’ work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Ruderman suggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-

For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.

Recent critical and scholarly interest in John Keats has encouraged a resurgence of interest in his friend and mentor, the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. This timely collection of essays by leading British and North America romanticists explores Hunt's life, writings and cultural significance over the full length of his career, arguing for the recognition of Hunt's importance to British intellectual and literary culture in the Romantic period.

Leigh Hunt’s contributions to English literature, although downplayed for several decades, are now acknowledged by scholars as key to our understanding of the Romantic period. He was not only a facilitator - in his support for the poetry of Shelley and Keats for example - but was also a major contributor in his own right to the literary and political world of the nineteenth century. Underscoring the literary innovations in his writing during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, this text focuses on the selected works that complement the current view of Hunt as a Romantic writer and show the independence in his critical approach and use of poetic language.With an episodic, chronological approach, this is an important reassessment of Hunt’s substantial contributions to several different genres, providing a fascinating account of the significant impact of his works on audiences during the Romantic period.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses.Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s. It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.

The rediscovery and restitution of William Hazlitt as a canonical Romantic author has been among the latest and most significant developments in present-day Romantic studies. This volume, a collection of previously unpublished essays by the foremost scholars in the field presents Hazlitt as a philosophical, and not simply a 'familiar' essayist. It offers a comprehensive statement of the significance and transmission of Hazlitt's philosophical principles, in his own work and in that of his contemporaries and succeeding writers. This book is an essential contribution to a vital new aspect of Romantic studies and shows Hazlitt to be, as his memorial claims, 'The first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age'.

Awarded the 2005 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize by the International Conference on RomanticismThis book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century novels written in response to Germaine de Staël's originary novel of the artist as heroine, corinne. The first book to delineate the contours of an international women's Romanticism, it argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. The book examines meditative, mystical and utopian visions of religious and artistic transcendence in the novels of women Romanticists as vehicles for the representation of a gendered subjectivity that seeks detachment and distance from the interests and strictures of the existing patriarchal social and cultural order. For these writers, the author argues, self-transcendence means an abandonment or dissolution of the individual self through political and spiritual efforts that culminate in a revelation of the divinity of a collective selfhood that comes into being through historical process.

Michael J. Franklin's Romantic Representations of British India is a timely study of the impact of Orientalist knowledge upon British culture during the Romantic period. The subject of the book is not so much India, but the British cultural understanding of India, particularly between 1750 and 1850. Franklin opens up new areas of investigation in Romantic-period culture, as those texts previously located in the ghetto of ‘Anglo-Indian writing’ are restored to a central place in the wider field of Romanticism. The essays within this collection cover a wide range of topics and are written by an impressive troupe of contributors including P.J. Marshall, Anne Mellor, and Nigel Leask. Students and academics involved with literary studies and history will find this book extremely useful, though musicologists and historians of science and of religion will also make good use of the book, as will those interested in questions of gender, race, and colonialism.

The ongoing critical fascination with Thomas De Quincey and the burgeoning recognition of the centrality of his writings to the Romantic age and beyond necessitates a critical examination of De Quincey. In this spirit, ten of the top De Quincey scholars in the world have come together in this volume to engage directly with the immense amount of new information to be published on De Quincey in the past two decades. The book features wide-ranging and incisive assessments of De Quincey as essayist, addict, economist, subversive, biographer, autobiographer, aesthete, innovator, hedonist, and much else.

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book’s novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced—and were influenced by—their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.