Examination of the relationship between science and literary history is providing valuable new insights for scholars across a range of disciplines. In this text John Wyatt explores the unexpectedly close relationship between a major Romantic poet and a group of scientists in the formative years of a new discipline, geology. Wordsworth's later poems display extensive knowledge of geology and a preoccupation with philosophical issues concerned with the developing science of geology. Letters and diaries of leading geologists of the time reveal that they knew, and discussed their subject with,...

Recent studies of Romanticism have neglected to examine the ways in which Romanticism defined itself by reconfiguring its literary past. Robert J. Griffin identifies the genesis of a Romantic narrative of literary history in which Alexander Pope figured as an alien poet of reason and imitation, and traces the transmission of "romantic literary history" from the Wartons to M. H. Abrams. In so doing, he calls into question some of our most basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.

This 1999 book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues...

This book offers an original study of debates that arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature and the new class of readers produced by the revolution in information and literacy in eighteenth-century England. The first part concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists and radical women authors, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

In the 1780s and 90s, theater critics described the stage as a state in political tumult, while politicians invoked theater as a model for politics both good and bad. In this study, Betsy Bolton examines the ways Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics. This well illustrated study draws on canonical poetry and personal memoirs, popular drama and parliamentary debates, political caricatures and theatrical reviews to extend current understandings of Romantic theater, the public sphere, and Romantic gender relations.

This volume is the first to address Jane Austen's writings within the traditions of Romanticism. Tuite's study presents a series of historically contextualized readings of Austen's juvenilia (Catharine, or The Bower and The History of England), Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Austen's posthumously published novel, Sanditon, to examine ways in which Romantic-period definitions of nation, culture and literature continue to function in contemporary readings of Austen and her period.

This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.

Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period.

Religious diversity and ferment characterize the period that gave rise to Romanticism in England. It is generally known that many individuals who contributed to the new literatures of the late eighteenth century came from Dissenting backgrounds, but we nonetheless often underestimate the full significance of nonconformist beliefs and practices during this period. Daniel White provides a clear and useful introduction to Dissenting communities, focusing on Anna Barbauld and her familial network of heterodox 'liberal' Dissenters whose religious, literary, educational, political, and economic...

Conservative culture in the Romantic period should not be understood merely as an effort to preserve the old regime in Britain against the threat of revolution. Instead, conservative thinkers and writers aimed to transform British culture and society to achieve a stable future in contrast to the destructive upheavals taking place in France. Kevin Gilmartin explores the literary forms of counterrevolutionary expression in Britain, showing that while conservative movements were often inclined to treat print culture as a dangerously unstable and even subversive field, a whole range of print...