This volume discusses the lives and writings of five nonconformist women who comprised the heart of a vibrant literary circle in England between 1760 and 1840. Whelan shows these women's keen awareness and often radical viewpoints on contemporary issues connected to politics, religion, gender, and the Romantic sensibility.

How does Romantic poetry read if seen as the product of a coterie of writers, editors, publishers, and critics rather than original lyrics composed by individual geniuses? Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries explores Romanticism as a discourse characterized by tropes and forms that were jointly produced by literary circles in self-conscious opposition to prevailing social and political values and in deliberate differentiation from the normal practices of contemporary print culture. Considering writing communities such as the Southey/Coleridge circle, the Bloomfield circle, and the Clare...

Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British salons were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation, with renowned guests such as Byron, Moore, Thackeray, and Baillie. In this comprehensive study of the British salon, Susanne Schmid traces the activities of three salonnieres: Mary Berry, Lady Holland, and the Countess of Blessington. Mapping out the central place these circles held in London, this study explains to what extent they shaped intellectual debate and publishing ventures. Using a large number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels,...

In this text nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. Richard Sha, Denise Gigante, and Anya Taylor, among others, make a timely contribution to recent debates about issues of pleasure, taste, and appetite by looking anew at the work of figures such as Byron, Coleridge, and Austen.

Once celebrated as 'the English Sappho, ' Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, a professional writer, a formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s

In Robert Southey, Andrews argues that Robert Southey'sdenunciation of global Catholicism is essential to understanding his life, works, and times. On this issue, Southey was absolutely consistent in all his work andthe Poet Laureate's partisan rhetoric reveals much about the religious culture of this stormy period in England."

The first study of the productions of the minor theatres, how they were adapted to appeal to the local patrons and the audiences who worked and lived in these communities.

Barbeau reconstructs the system of religion that Coleridge develops in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). Coleridge's late system links four sources of divinity the Bible, the traditions of the church, the interior work of the Spirit, and the inspired preacher to Christ, the Word. In thousands of marginalia and private notebook entries, Coleridge challenges traditional views of the formation and inspiration of the Bible, clarifies the role of the church in biblical interpretation, and elucidates the relationship between the objective and subjective sources of revelation. In late...

Nichols chronicles the Enlightenment view of 'Nature' as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic 'nature' characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship, he draws new conclusions about21st-century ideas of nature."