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.

Gary Dyer breaks new ground by surveying and interpreting hundreds of satirical poems and prose narratives published in Britain during the Romantic period. These works have been neglected by literary scholars, satisfied that satire disappeared in the late eighteenth century. Dyer argues that satire continued to be a major and widely-read genre, and that contemporary political and social conflicts gave new meanings to conventions inherited from classical Rome and eighteenth-century England. He includes a bibliography of more than 700 volumes containing satirical verses.

Sonia Hofkosh explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, especially in terms of the simultaneous commercialization and feminization of literature. Examining a wide range of texts, she shows how the development of a female reading audience aroused anxieties in the male writers of the period. The author also considers the ways in which three women writers (Mary Shelley, Sarah Hazlitt and Jane Austen) attempted to negotiate the minefields of a male-dominated literary discourse that rendered the female "invisible."

This innovative study examines the dialogue between British Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, engaging with major discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology by preeminent theorists such as Malthus, Godwin and Burke. The book provides original readings of canonical works, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and has much to say about the place of Romantic poetry...

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the "minor" author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. Situating De Quincey's writing in relation to the "major" poets he promoted, as well as the essays of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others, Russett shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.

In this study, Mark Parker argues that magazines such as the London Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine offered an innovative and collaborative space for writers and their work--indeed, magazines became one of the preeminent literary forms of the 1820s and 1830s. Examining the dynamic relationship between literature and culture that evolved within this context, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism claims that writing in such a setting enters into a variety of alliances with other contributions and with ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning.

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...

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...

This ambitious study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of "indifferentism." Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. The tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so prevalent during the Romantic period. These discussions rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance. Kipp's primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother-child bonds variously as a means to naturalize, endorse, and critique Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations.