Mark Canuel examines the way that Romantic poets, novelists and political writers criticized the traditional religious conformity of British political unity. Canuel reveals how writers (including Jeremy Bentham, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Lord Byron) undermined the validity of religion in the British state, and envisioned a tolerant and more organized mode of social inclusion and protection. He asserts that these writers considered their works to be political and literary commentaries on religious toleration.

This book is the first investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to debates on the nature of dreaming among poets, philosophers and scientists in the Romantic period. Coleridge wrote and read extensively on the subject, but his diverse and original ideas have hitherto received little attention. Avoiding purely biographical or psychoanalytic approaches, Jennifer Ford reveals instead a rich historical context for the ways in which the most mysterious workings of the Romantic imagination were explored and understood.

Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.

This ambitious and original study explores the connections between aesthetic theory and political theory from the era of Romanticism to the twentieth century. David Kaiser traces these ideas through Schiller and Coleridge, Arnold, Mill and Ruskin, to Adorno and Habermas. He analyzes the problems that contemporary literary theory faces in attempting to connect the aesthetic and political spheres, and suggests that we rethink the aesthetic sphere in order to regain that connection.

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.

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.

In British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, Miranda Burgess examines what Romantic-period writers called "romance." Reading a broad range of fictional and nonfictional works published between 1740 and 1830, Burgess places authors such as Richardson, Scott, Austen and Wollstonecraft in a new economic, social, and cultural context. She argues that the romance held a key role in remaking the national order of a Britain dependent on ideologies of human nature for justification of its social, economic, and political systems.

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.

Eighteenth-century diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters, fallen women and female nervous wrecks. In Reading Daughters' Fictions, Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and nonliterary materials of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She argues that domestic novels of family life and courtship, far from corrupting female readers, helped to maintain familial and social order.