This ambitious study sheds new light on the way the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth-century to respond to empirical scepticism had produced a culture of "indifferentism." Tim Milnes explores the tension between this epistemic indifference and a perpetual compulsion to know. The tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and affected their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s and discusses the work of such well-known figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. This examination of women writers' fatal...

Demonstrating how English Romantic writing took up issues of what we now call animal rights, this study joins the growing number of studies that seek precedents or affinities in English Romanticism for ecological concerns. An unprecedented amount of writing advocated kindness to animals in England during the second half of the eighteenth century. This theme was carried through many genres, from sermons to encyclopedias, scientific works to literature for children, and to the poetry of Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare and others.

Kevis Goodman traces connections between georgic verse and developments in other spheres that were placing unprecedented emphasis on mediation from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. She expands the subject of the Georgic to broader areas of literary and cultural study--including the history of the feelings, print culture, and early scientific technology. Goodman maintains that the verse form presents ways of perceiving history in terms of sensation, rather than burying history in nature, an approach more usually associated with Romanticism.

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.

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the "minor" author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. Situating De Quincey's writing in relation to the "major" poets he promoted, as well as the essays of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others, Russett shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.

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.

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The last major work by Marilyn Butler, leading literary critic of the late twentieth century, on imaginative ideas of nationhood.