During the Romantic era, especially in Italy, performers known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici extemporised poetry in public in response to subjects requested by their audiences. This type of performance fascinated Grand Tourists from northern Europe, who reported on poetic improvisers in hundreds of travel accounts, journals, letters, and periodical articles. By uncovering historical data and interpreting literary texts, Professor Esterhammer identifies patterns in the evolving responses of English, German, French, and Russian writers to the experience of improvisation. She explores...

The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as Englishmen and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine, and the law, and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, Stauffer charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self. In their poetry and...

Deirdre Coleman examines Romantic initiatives to establish an empire without slaves, one that would also encompass revolutionary sexual, racial, and labor changes. The loss of Britain's transatlantic empire precipitated much debate about the nature of colonization from 1770 to 1800. Combined with the changing impact of colonialism and immigration in England, the growing popularity of the anti-slavery movement prompted many utopian and Romantic responses to colonization.

Ina Ferris examines the way in which the problem of "incomplete union" (generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in 1800) destabilized British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ferris presents a full-length study of the chief genre to emerge out of the political problem of Union: the national tale, an intercultural and mostly female-authored fictional mode that articulated Irish grievances to English readers.

Jane Stabler presents this examination of Byron's poetic form in relationship to historical debates of his time. Responding to recent studies in the Romantic period, Stabler asserts that Byron's poetics developed in response to contemporary cultural history and his reception by the English reading public. Drawing on new research, she traces the complexity of the intertextual dialogues that run through his work.

Offering a genuinely fresh set of perspectives on Shelley's texts and contexts, Cian Duffy argues that Shelley's engagement with the British and French discourse on the sublime had a profound influence on his writing about political change in that age of revolutionary crisis. Examining Shelley's extensive use of sublime imagery and metaphor, Duffy offers not only a substantial reassessment of Shelley's work but also a significant re-appraisal of the sublime's role in the cultural history of Britain during the Romantic period as well as Shelley's fascination with natural phenomena.

Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities.

Dramatic changes in the reading public and literary market in early nineteenth-century England not only altered the relationship between poet and reader but prompted new conceptions of the poetic text, literary reception, and authorship. With the decline of patronage, the rise of the novel and the periodical press, and the emergence of the mass reading public, poets could no longer assume the existence of an audience for poetry. Andrew Franta examines how the reconfigurations of the literary market and the publishing context transformed the ways poets conceived of their audience and the forms...

British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. Beginning with the golden age of forgery in the late eighteenth century and continuing through canonical Romanticism and its aftermath, Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. The book includes works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, John Clare, and James Hogg, as well as chapters on impostors in popular culture. Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its...

Wordsworth wrote that he longed to compose 'some philosophic Song/Of Truth that cherishes our daily life'. Yet he never finished The Recluse, his long philosophical poem. Simon Jarvis argues that Wordsworth's aspiration to 'philosophic song' is central to his greatness, and changed the way English poetry was written. Some critics see Wordworth as a systematic thinker, while for others he is a poet first, and a thinker only (if at all) second. Jarvis shows instead how essential both philosophy and the 'song' of poetry were to Wordsworth's achievement. Drawing on advanced work in continental...