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  3. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism is a series of original critical studies devoted to literature in English from the early 1780s to the early 1830s, written against the background of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. Books in the series have an interdisciplinary bias, examining for example the relations between literature and politics, science, philosophy or religion; or looking at gender relations, notions of literature, and literary history, as revealed in Romantic writing and the critical and theoretical traditions which the literature of this period has helped to shape.

  • Founding Editors: Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
  • General Editors: James Chandler, University of Chicago
  • Editorial Boards: Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow, Paul Hamilton, University of London, Claire Connolly, University College Cork, Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, New Jersey, Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara, Jerome McGann, University of Virginia, David Simpson, University of California, Davis, Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame, Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

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114 results in Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

Page 4 of 6

Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840
  • Cockney Adventures
  • Gregory Dart
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    26 July 2012
  • Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockneyism as a powerful critical currency in this period, which helps provide a link between the works of Leigh Hunt and Keats in the 1810s and the early works of Charles Dickens in the 1830s. Through an examination of literary history, art history, urban history and social history, this book identifies the early nineteenth-century figure of the Cockney as the true ancestor of modernity.

Romanticism and Childhood
  • The Infantilization of British Literary Culture
  • Ann Wierda Rowland
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 May 2012
  • How and why childhood became so important to such a wide range of Romantic writers has long been one of the central questions of literary historical studies. Ann Wierda Rowland discovers new answers to this question in the rise of a vernacular literary tradition. In the Romantic period the child came fully into its own as the object of increasing social concern and cultural investment; at the same time, modern literary culture consolidated itself along vernacular, national lines. Romanticism and Childhood is the first study to examine the intersections of these historical developments and the first study to demonstrate that a rhetoric of infancy and childhood - the metaphors, images, figures and phrases repeatedly used to represent and conceptualize childhood - enabled Romantic writers to construct a national literary history and culture capable of embracing a wider range of literary forms.

Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800
  • Paul Keen
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    02 February 2012
  • Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith's account of selling his work at a 'Fashion Fair' on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm's mock plan to establish 'a licensed warehouse for wit', writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transactional society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history.

A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829
  • Claire Connolly
  • Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    17 November 2011
  • Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian scholarship, poetry, song, plays and memoirs, produced a series of notable fictions; marked most of all by their ability to fashion from these resources a new vocabulary of cultural identity. This book extends and enriches the current understanding of Irish Romanticism, blending sympathetic textual analysis of the fiction with careful historical contextualization.

De Quincey's Romanticism
  • Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission
  • Margaret Russett
  • Published online:
    26 October 2011
    Print publication:
    04 December 1997
  • 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. The case of De Quincey, neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author, offers a point of access to specifically Romantic problems of literary transmission and periodization. Taking an intertextual approach, Russett situates De Quincey's career against the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge; the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt, and other writers for the London Magazine; and discourses of ethics and political economy which are central to the problem of determining literary value. De Quincey's Romanticism shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.

Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830
  • Richard Adelman
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    26 May 2011
  • Reconstructing the literary and philosophical reaction to Adam Smith's dictum that man is a labouring animal above and before all else, this study explores the many ways in which Romantic writers presented idle contemplation as the central activity in human life. By contrasting the British response to Smith's political economy with that of contemporary German Idealists, Richard Adelman also uses this consideration of the importance of idleness to Romantic aesthetics to chart the development of a distinctly British idealism in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Exploring the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and many of their contemporaries, this study pinpoints a debate over human activity and capability taking place between 1750 and 1830, and considers its social and political consequences for the cultural theory of the early nineteenth century.

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820
  • Juliet Shields
  • Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    24 June 2010
  • What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

The Truth about Romanticism
  • Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge
  • Tim Milnes
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    03 June 2010
  • How have our conceptions of truth been shaped by romantic literature? This question lies at the heart of this examination of the concept of truth both in romantic writing and in modern criticism. The romantic idea of truth has long been depicted as aesthetic, imaginative and ideal. Tim Milnes challenges this picture, demonstrating a pragmatic strain in the writing of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge in particular, that bears a close resemblance to the theories of modern pragmatist thinkers such as Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas. Romantic pragmatism, Milnes argues, was in turn influenced by recent developments within linguistic empiricism. This book will be of interest to readers of romantic literature, but also to philosophers, literary theorists, and intellectual historians.

Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism
  • Alexander Regier
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    25 March 2010
  • What associates fragmentation with Romanticism? In this book, Alexander Regier explains how fracture and fragmentation form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism can be analysed in a particularly effective way. These categories also supply a critical framework for a discussion of fundamental issues concerning language and thought in the period. Over the course of the volume, Regier discusses fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, offering new readings of Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period. He also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man. More generally, Regier's discussion of fragmentation exposes a philosophical problem that lies behind the definition of Romanticism.

Scotland and the Fictions of Geography
  • North Britain 1760–1830
  • Penny Fielding
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    11 December 2008
  • Focusing on the relationship between England and Scotland and the interaction between history and geography, Penny Fielding explores how Scottish literature in the Romantic period was shaped by the understanding of place and space. This book examines geography as a form of regional, national and global definition, addressing national surveys, local stories, place-names and travel writing, and argues that the case of Scotland complicates the identification of Romanticism with the local. Fielding considers Scotland as 'North Britain' in a period when the North of Europe was becoming a strong cultural and political identity, and explores ways in which Scotland was both formative and disruptive of British national consciousness. Containing studies of Robert Burns, Walter Scott and James Hogg, as well as the lesser-known figures of Anne Grant and Margaret Chalmers, this study discusses an exceptionally broad range of historical, geographical, scientific, linguistic, antiquarian and political writing from throughout North Britain.

The Invention of Evening
  • Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry
  • Christopher R. Miller
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    21 September 2006
  • Lyric poetry has long been considered an art form of timelessness, but Romantic poets became fascinated by one time above all others: evening, the threshold between day and night. Christopher R. Miller investigates the cultural background of this development. The tradition of evening poetry runs from the idyllic settings of Virgil to the urban twilights of T. S. Eliot, and flourished in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. In fresh readings of familiar Romantic poems, Miller shows how evening settings enabled poets to represent the passage of time and to associate it with subtle movements of thought and perception. This leads to new ways of reading canonical works, and of thinking about the kinds of themes the lyric can express.

Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology
  • Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution
  • Tom Furniss
  • Published online:
    18 February 2010
    Print publication:
    22 July 1993
  • This study develops a detailed reading of the interrelations between aesthetics, ideology, language, gender and political economy in two highly influential works by Edmund Burke: his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), and the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Tom Furniss's close attention to the rhetorical labyrinths of these texts is combined with an attempt to locate them within the larger discursive networks of the period, including texts by Locke, Hume and Smith. This process reveals that Burke's contradictions and inconsistencies are symptomatic of a strenuous engagement with the ideological problems endemic to the period. Burke's dilemma in this respect makes the Reflections an audacious compromise which simultaneously defends the ancien régime, contributes towards the articulation of radical thought, and makes possible the revolution which we call English Romanticism.

Literature, Education, and Romanticism
  • Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832
  • Alan Richardson
  • Published online:
    08 February 2010
    Print publication:
    10 November 1994
  • In this wide-ranging and detailed book Alan Richardson addresses many issues in literary and educational history never before examined together. The result is an unprecedented study of how transformations in schooling and literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1832 helped shape the provision of literature as we now know it. In chapters focused on such topics as definitions of childhood, educational methods and institutions, children's literature, female education, and publishing ventures aimed at working-class adults, Richardson demonstrates how literary genres, from fairy tales to epic poems, were enlisted in an ambitious programme for transforming social relations through reading and education. Romantic texts - including Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Yearsley - are reinterpreted in the light of the complex historical and social issues which inform them and which they in turn critically address.

Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818
  • Elizabeth A. Bohls
  • Published online:
    02 February 2010
    Print publication:
    19 October 1995
  • 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 Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls' study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre.

The Lake Poets and Professional Identity
  • Brian Goldberg
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    30 August 2007
  • The idea that the inspired poet stands apart from the marketplace is considered central to British Romanticism. However, Romantic authors were deeply concerned with how their occupation might be considered a kind of labour comparable to that of the traditional professions. In the process of defining their work as authors, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge - the 'Lake school' - aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the 'professional gentleman' that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture. They modelled their idea of authorship on the learned professions of medicine, church, and law, which allowed them to imagine a productive relationship to the marketplace and to adopt the ways eighteenth-century poets had related their poetry to other kinds of intellectual work. In this work, Goldberg explores the ideas of professional risk, evaluation and competition that the writers developed as a response to a variety of eighteenth-century depictions of the literary career.

Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime
  • Cian Duffy
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    06 October 2005
  • A major new study of Percy Shelley's intellectual life and poetic career, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime identifies Shelley's fascination with sublime natural phenomena as a key element in his understanding of the way ideas like 'nature' and 'imagination' informed the social and political structures of the Romantic period. 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 role of the sublime in the cultural history of Britain during the Romantic period.

The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800
  • E. J. Clery
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    16 February 1995
  • A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment. This book charts the troubled entry of the supernatural into fiction, and 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. The central thesis concerns the connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism: not only are ghost stories successful commodities in the rapidly commercialising book market, they are also considered here as reflections on the disruptive effects of this socio-economic transformation.

British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832
  • Gary Dyer
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 July 1997
  • This book surveys and interprets the hundreds of satirical poems and prose narratives published in Britain during the Romantic period. Although satire was a major genre with a wide readership, such works have been largely neglected by literary scholars, satisfied that satire disappeared in the late eighteenth century. Paying as much attention to now-forgotten figures like John Wolcot ('Peter Pindar') and Jane Taylor as to Byron, Gary Dyer argues that contemporary political and social conflicts gave new meanings to conventions of satire inherited from classical Rome and eighteenth-century England. Situating these satires in their cultural and material context sheds light on issues such as the tactics satirists used to deflect prosecution for sedition, and the ramification for women writers of satire's 'masculine' connotations. The book includes a bibliography of more than 700 volumes containing satirical verses.

William Cobbett
  • The Politics of Style
  • Leonora Nattrass
  • Published online:
    11 November 2009
    Print publication:
    12 January 1995
  • This book offers a thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, showing through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings (from his early American journalism onwards) the complexity, self-consciousness and skill of his stylistic procedures. Her close readings examine the political implications of Cobbett's style within the broader context of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century political prose, and argue that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws - inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia - are in fact rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarized reading audiences. This re-reading revises a critical concensus that Cobbett is an unselfconscious populist whose writings reflect rather than challenge the ideological paradoxes and problems of his time.

Coleridge on Dreaming
  • Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination
  • Jennifer Ford
  • Published online:
    04 November 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 1997
  • This book is the first in-depth investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary debates on the nature of dreaming, a subject of perennial interest to poets, philosophers and scientists throughout the Romantic period. Coleridge wrote and read extensively on the subject, but his richly diverse and original ideas have hitherto received little attention, scattered as they are throughout his notebooks, letters and marginalia. Jennifer Ford's emphasis is on analysing the ways in which dreaming processes were construed, by Coleridge in his dream readings, and by his contemporaries in a range of poetic and medical works. This historical exploration of dreams and dreaming allows Ford to explore previously neglected contemporary debates on 'the medical imagination'. By avoiding purely biographical or psychoanalytic approaches, she reveals instead a rich historical context for the ways in which the most mysterious workings of the Romantic imagination were explored and understood.

Page 4 of 6