Reinventing Allegory asks how and why allegory has survived as a literary mode from the late Renaissance to the postmodern present. Three chapters on Romanticism, including one on the painter J.M.W. Turner, present this era as the pivotal moment in allegory's modern survival, while other chapters describe larger historical and philosophical contexts, from classical rhetoric to recent theory and metafiction. Using a series of key historical moments to define the special character of modern allegory, this study assesses allegory's role in comtemporary literary culture.

The area of symplectic geometry has developed rapidly in the past ten years with major new discoveries that were motivated by and have provided links with many other subjects such as dynamical systems, topology, gauge theory, mathematical physics, and singularity theory. The contributions to this volume reflect the richness of the subject and include expository papers as well as original research.

The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. In this innovative study of the transformations of a genre, David Duff examines the paradox whereby the unstable visionary world of romance came to provide an apt language for the representation of revolution, and how the literary form was itself politicized in the period. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, the author traces the ambivalent ideological overtones of the...

This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings from his early American journalism onward. She examines the political implications of Cobbett's style within the broader context of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century political prose, and argues that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws--inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia--are in fact strategies designed to appeal...

In this innovative study Alan Richardson addresses issues in literary and educational history never examined together before. He argues that transformations in schooling and literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1832 helped shape the provision of literature as we now know it. Topics include definitions of childhood, educational methods and institutions, children's literature and female education. Richardson charts how social relations were transformed through reading and education, and Romantic texts are reinterpreted in the light of historical and social issues.

This groundbreaking study addresses the representation of food and drink in the works of Percy and Mary Shelley. With original studies of much-debated texts, it provides new perspectives in recent cultural history and theory concerning medicine and diet in the 1790SH1820 period. Morton shows how food in the social and literary text provided complex and ambivalent ways of signaling ideological preferences. It will appeal to all those interested in the body, ecology and social and anthropological approaches to Romantic literature.

Napoleon Bonaparte occupied a central place in the consciousness of many British writers of the Romantic period. In this first full-length study of Romantic writers' obsession with Napoleon, Simon Bainbridge focuses on the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron and Hazlitt. Combining detailed textual analysis with historical and theoretical approaches, and illustrating his argument with contemporary cartoons, Bainbridge shows how Romantic writers constructed and contested different Napoleons as part of their partisan engagement in political and cultural debate.

Romantic Vagrancy offers a provocative account of Wordsworth's representation of walking as the exercise of imagination, by tracing a recurrent analogy between the poet in search of materials and the literally dispossessed beggars and vagrants he encounters. Reading Wordsworth--and Rousseau before him--from the perspective of current debates about the political and social rights of the homeless, Celeste Langan argues that both literature and vagrancy are surprisingly rich and disturbing images of the 'negative freedom' at the heart of liberalism. Langan shows how the formal structure of the...

A defining feature of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterization of the self in terms of psychological depth. Many Romantic writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way, and in Romantic Identities Andrea K. Henderson investigates Romantic writing that challenges the "depth" model, or operates outside its domain. Henderson explores various forms of discourse and their perceptions of identity, examines subjects ranging from obstetrics to gothicism, and considers writings by Radcliffe, Byron, Scott, and Shelley, among others.

The sentimental novel has long been noted for its liberal and humanitarian interests. In The Politics of Sensibility Markman Ellis argues that sentimental fiction also consciously participated in specific political controversies of the late eighteenth century, including emerging arguments about the ethics of slavery, the morality of commerce, and the movement to reform prostitutes. He shows that sentimental fiction was a public as well as a private genre, and that the very form of the novel was recognized as a political tool of cultural significance.