The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age reveals the extent to which writers now called romantic venerate and use classical texts to transform lyric and narrative poetry, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race and slavery, as well as to provide models for their own literary careers and personal lives. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics-including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded as a classical language-play a major role in what becomes labeled romanticism only later in the nineteenth century.

The relation between classic and romantic is...

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, as the book explores, provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a...

This book examines how manuscript practices interacted with an expanding print marketplace to nurture and transform the period's literary culture. It unearths the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture, describing the practices by which handwritten documents were written, shared, altered and preserved, and explores the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability. By demonstrating how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between the media of script and print.

This book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic, broken down into distinct writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction, and contexts including pre- and post-Revolution America and French-Canadian cultural nationalism. Scots, who were at the vanguard of British colonial expansion in North America in the Romantic period, believed that their own nation had undergone an unprecedented transformation in only a short span of time. Scottish writers became preoccupied...

With explosive interest in Romantic science and theories of mind and a renewed sense of the period's porousness to the world, along with new developments in cognitive theory and research, Romantic studies scholars have been called to revisit and re-map the terrain laid out in the highly influential 1970 volume Romanticism and Consciousness. Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited brings this shift in approach to Romantic consciousness no longer the possession of a sole self but transactional, social, and entangled with the outside world up to date.

In December 1840, Charlotte Bronte wrote in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she wished 'with all [her] heart' that she 'had been born in time to contribute to the Lady's magazine'. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed women's reading and women's writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Lady's Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publication's eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Lady's Magazine (1770 1832) and the...

British Romanticism and Denmark shows how the articulation in British Romantic-period writing of the idea of a 'Northern' cultural identity shared by Britain and Denmark and rooted in the classical Scandinavian past played an important role in the emergence and development of Romanticism and Romantic nationalism in both countries. By addressing a wide range of Nordic as well as Anglophone scholarship, this study offers new perspectives on British, Danish and European Romanticisms, and on the relationship between them.