English Romanticism has long been considered an 'undramatic' and 'anti-theatrical' age, yet Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats all wrote plays and viewed them as central to England's poetic and political reform. In the Theatre of Romanticism analyses these plays, in the context of London theatre at the time, and argues that Romantic discourse on theatre is crucial to constructions of nationhood in the period. The book focuses primarily on Coleridge and on the middle stage of his career, during which he wrote most extensively for and about the theatre. But its discussion of...

The authors of this study examine the massive impact of colonial exploration upon British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s. This broad-ranging survey will appeal to literary and cultural studies scholars.

Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of "second generation" Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the "Cockney School." Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others. This book not only demonstrates convincingly that a "Cockney School" existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform.

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.

This study of correspondence in the Romantic period calls into question the common notion that letters are a particularly 'romantic', personal, and ultimately feminine form of writing.

The recent turn to political and historical readings of Romanticism has given us a more complex picture of the institutional, cultural and sexual politics of the period. There has been a tendency, however, to confine such study to the European scene. In this book, Nigel Leask sets out to study the work of Byron, Shelley and De Quincey (together with a number of other major and minor Romantic writers, including Robert Southey and Tom Moore) in relation to Britain's imperial designs on the 'Orient'. Combining historical and theoretical approaches with detailed analyses of specific works, it...

This is the first book to examine the literature of the Romantic period as a conscious attempt to affect the religious transformation of society. Robert Ryan argues that the political quarrel that preoccupied England during the Romantic period was in large part an argument about the religious character of the nation, and that the Romantics became active and conspicuous participants in this public debate. Ryan shows how the careers of the Romantic poets are radically reconfigured when viewed in the context of the period's passionate debate on religion, politics and society.

Helen Thomas' study opens a new avenue for Romanticism by exploring connections with literature produced by slaves, slave owners, abolitionists and radical dissenters between 1770 and 1830. In the first major attempt to relate canonical Romantic texts to writings of the African diaspora, she investigates English literary Romanticism in the context of a transatlantic culture, and African culture in the context of eighteenth-century Britain. In so doing, she reveals an intertextual dialogue between two diverse yet equally rich cultural spheres, and their corresponding systems of thought,...

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.

British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley...