This historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterized at times by antagonistic relations between writers or works. Watt examines the novels' political import and concludes by looking ahead to the fluctuating critical status of Scott and the Gothic, and perceptions of the Gothic as a monolithic tradition, which continue to exert a powerful hold.

Timothy Morton explores the significance of spice, and the spice trade, in Romantic literature, shedding new light on the impact of a growing consumer culture and capitalist ideology on writers of the period. The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many others.

Considers Blake's poetry in the light of ideology critique and the traditions of Utopian thought.

Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain, from the 1780s onward. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, as well as a host of less canonical poet-intellectuals and controversialists of the time. Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lent it a protean energy belied by the more recent conception of "loss...

This 1999 book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues...

This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre--the Gothic. Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

A defining feature of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterization of the self in terms of psychological depth. Many Romantic writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way, and in Romantic Identities Andrea K. Henderson investigates Romantic writing that challenges the "depth" model, or operates outside its domain. Henderson explores various forms of discourse and their perceptions of identity, examines subjects ranging from obstetrics to gothicism, and considers writings by Radcliffe, Byron, Scott, and Shelley, among others.

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."