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...

This study addresses a paradox in the lives of women in Jane Austen's time who had no legal access to money yet were held responsible for domestic expenditure. The book translates the fictional money of the novels of Jane Austen's day into the power of contemporary spendable incomes, and from the perspective of what the British pound could buy at the market, the economic lives of women in the novels emerge as part of a general picture of women's economic disability. Through the work of writers such as Austen and Edgeworth, as well as those of magazine fiction, the author examines the...

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.

In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become western feminism's leading icon, a stature that has obscured her actual historic significance. Examining in detail Wollstonecraft's writings, Barbara Taylor provides an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Her feminist principles are shown to have arisen within a revolutionary program for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in...

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,...

A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment. This book questions the historical reasons for its growing popularity in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with the notorious case of the Cock Lane ghost, a performing poltergeist who became a major attraction in London in 1762, and with Garrick's spellbinding and paradigmatic performance as the ghost-seeing Hamlet, it moves on to look at the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and others, in unexpected new lights, drawing out the connection between fictions of the...

In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, and novelists such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, are shown to have shared a surprising extent of common ground with pioneering brain scientists including Erasmus Darwin and F. J. Gall. It demonstrates the value for literary and cultural history of learning from recent work in neuroscience and cognitive science.