This ambitious study offers a radical reassessment of one of the most important concepts of the Romantic period--the imagination. In contrast to traditional accounts, John Whale locates the Romantic imagination within the period's lively and often antagonistic polemics on aesthetics and politics, focusing in particular on British responses to the French Revolution and the ideology of utilitarianism. Through detailed analysis of key texts by Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Hazlitt, Cobbett and Coleridge, this book seeks to restore the role of imagination as a more positive force within...

This book examines the legacy of Romantic poetics in the poetry produced in political movements during the nineteenth century. It argues that a communitarian tradition of poetry extending from the 1790s to William Morris in the 1890s learned from and incorporated elements of Romantic lyricism, and produced an ongoing and self-conscious tradition of radical poetics. The book includes new readings of familiar Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Shelley, and provides case studies of relatively unknown Chartist and Republican poets such as Ernest Jones and W.J. Linton.

Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war. This book explores how the introduction on the...

Exploring a topic at the intersection of science, philosophy and literature, this book traces the history of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - as a writerly practice, and accounts for mixtures of poetry and prose in the work of major Romantic-period writers.

Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw...

The tavern is widely acknowledged as central to the cultural and political life of Britain, yet widely misunderstood. Ian Newman provides the first sustained account of one of the primary institutions of the late eighteenth-century public sphere. The tavern was a venue not only for serious political and literary debate, but also for physical pleasure - the ludic, libidinal and gastronomic enjoyments with which late Georgian public life was inextricably entwined. This study focuses on the architecture of taverns and the people who frequented them, as well as the artistic forms - drinking...

During the 1820s, British society saw transformations in technology, mobility, and consumerism that accelerated the spread of information. This timely study reveals how bestselling literature, popular theatre, and periodical journalism self-consciously experimented with new media. It presents an age preoccupied with improvisation and speculation – a mode of behaviour that dominated financial and literary markets, generating reflections on risk, agency, and the importance of public opinion. Print and Performance in the 1820s interprets a rich constellation of fictional texts and theatrical...