This reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centres on its almost obsessive representation of spectral forms and images of death in life. Wordsworth is reacting, Simpson argues, to the massive changes in the condition of England and the modern world at the turn of the century: mass warfare; the increased scope of machine-driven labour and urbanisation; and the expanding power of commodity form in rendering economic and social exchange more and more abstract, more and more distant from human agency and control. Reading Wordsworth alongside Marx and Derrida, Simpson...

Advertising, which developed in the late eighteenth century as an increasingly sophisticated and widespread form of brand marketing, would seem a separate world from that of the 'literature' of its time. Yet satirists and parodists were influenced by and responded to advertising, while copywriters borrowed from the wider literary culture, especially through poetical advertisements and comic imitation. This study to pays sustained attention to the cultural resonance and literary influences of advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. John Strachan addresses the many...

The first major study to focus on British and Chinese cultural relations in the Romantic period.

Real Money and Romanticism interprets poetry and fiction by Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Charles Dickens in the context of changes in the British monetary system and in the broader economy during the early nineteenth century. In this period modern systems of paper money and intellectual property became established; Matthew Rowlinson describes the consequent changes in relations between writers and publishers and shows how a new conception of material artifacts as the bearers of abstract value shaped Romantic conceptions of character, material culture, and labor. A fresh and radically...

How have our conceptions of truth been shaped by romantic literature? This question lies at the heart of this examination of the concept of truth both in romantic writing and in modern criticism. The romantic idea of truth has long been depicted as aesthetic, imaginative, and ideal. Tim Milnes challenges this picture, demonstrating a pragmatic strain in the writing of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge in particular, that bears a close resemblance to the theories of modern pragmatist thinkers such as Donald Davidson and Jurgen Habermas. Romantic pragmatism, Milnes argues, was in turn influenced by...

Mike Goode challenges received accounts of the development of modern historical thought, arguing that, in Romantic and Victorian Britain, struggles over historical authority were as much disputes over the nature of proper masculinity as they were contests over ideas and interpretations. Drawing on primary materials from such diverse fields as political economy, moral philosophy, medicine, antiquarian study, and visual satire, Goode uncovers a Romantic historical tradition - one most influentially realized by historical novels - which held that historians must be manly and sentimental in order...

Troubled politically and personally, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned in 1797 to the London stage. Their tragedies, The Borderers and Osorio, were set in medieval Britain and early modern Spain to avoid the Lord Chamberlain's censorship. Drury Lane rejected both, but fifteen years later, Coleridge's revision, Remorse, had spectacular success there, inspiring Shelley's 1819 Roman tragedy, The Cenci, aimed for Covent Garden. Reeve Parker makes a striking case for the power of these intertwined works, written against British hostility to French republican liberties and Regency repression of...

Shelley's drafts and notebooks, which have recently been published for the first time, are very revealing about the creative processes behind his poems, and show through illustrations and doodles an unexpectedly vivid visual imagination which contributed in a major way to the effect of his poetry. Shelley's Visual Imagination analyzes both verbal script and visual sketches in his manuscripts to interpret the lively personifications of concepts such as 'Liberty', 'Anarchy', or 'Life' in his completed poems. Challenging the persistent assumption that Shelley's poetry in particular and Romantic...

Susan Matthews examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality. Chapters focus on Fuseli and female sexuality, William Hayley and bluestocking culture, William Cowper and the sexuality of the natural world, and Richardson and the representation of rape.

This title examines the idea of 'gift-giving' (as opposed to commercial exchange) to reassess a wide range of issues in the thought and work of William Blake. It addresses the nature of Blake's critique of commercial economics, his ideas regarding sociality, and his own production and dissemination of his work.