Including classic essays and lively debates, British Romanticism shows that Romantic literature is an interesting and exciting topic to read and study. Combining key pieces from the last 25 years alongside newly written essays offering fresh takes on the area, this book covers the essential topics but with a contemporary and dynamic twist.
Each section includes a detailed introduction and covers issues which are as relevant to current readers as to those in the romantic period, such as media, science, religion, politics, ethics, gender, sexuality, race, nationalism and ethics. The book contains additional features such as suggestions for further reading and an introduction to the history of interpreting Romantic Literature. Designed to appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate readers, this distinctive volume reflects the vibrant debates across Romantic Studies from the 1990s to the present.
Introduction Part 1 Politics, Ideology, and the Literary 1. Insight and Oversight: Reading Tintern Abbey, Marjorie Levinson 2. Keats and Critique, Paul Hamilton 3. Βyron’s Causes: The Moral Mechanics of Don Juan, James Chandler 4. Stealing Culture in the Shadow of Revolutions, Daniel O’Quinn Part 2 Aesthetics and Literary Form 5. Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail, Alan Liu 6. Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth, Frances Ferguson 7. Legislators of the Post-Everything Word: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno, Robert Kaufman 8. Utility, Retribution, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mark Canuel Part 3 Audiences and Reading Publics 9. The Sense of an Audience, Lucy Newlyn 10. Theater as the School of Virtue, Ann K. Mellor 11. Study to be Quiet, Kevin Gilmartin 12. Audience, Irony, and Shelley, Andrew Franta Part 4 Authorship and Authority 13. From ‘National Tale’ to ‘Historical Novel’: Edgeworth, Morgan, and Scott, Ina Ferris 14. Keats’s Prescience, Andrew Bennett 15. DeQuincey’s Imperial Systems, Anne Frey 16. Milton Unbound, Margaret Russett Part 5 Gender, Sexuality, and the Body 17. Gendering the Soul, Susan Wolfson 18. The Domestication of Genius: Cowper and the Rise of the Suburban Man, Andrew Elfenbein 19. Sensibility, Free Indirect Style, and the Romantic Technology of Discretion, Clara Tuite 20. Writing/Righting Gender, Jacqueline M. Labbe Part 6 Racism, Nationalism, Imperialism 21. Was Frankenstein’s Monster ‘a Man and a Brother’?, H.L. Malchow 22. Blake and Romantic Imperialism, Saree Makdisi 23. "Voices of Dead Complaint" Colonial Military Disease Narratives, Alan Bewell 24. Anna Barbauld and the Ethics of Free Trade Imperialism, E.J. Clery Part 7 Affects 25. Phantom Feelings, Emotional Occupation in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Adela Pinch 26. Female Authorship, Public Fancy, Julie Ellison 27. The Art of Knowing Nothing, Jacques Khalip 28. The Force off Indirection: ‘Tintern Abbey’ in the Literary History of Mood, David Collings Part 8 Religion and Secularization 29. The Unknown God, Robert Ryan 30. Wordsworth’s Chastened Enthusiasm, Jon Mee 31. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and the Legacies of Dissent, Daniel E. White 32. The Entangled Spirituality of ‘The Thorn’, Colin Jager Part 9 Modernity and Postmodernity 33. The Romantic Movement at the End of History, Jerome Christensen 34. Everyday War, Mary Favret 35. Modernity’s Other Worlds, Ian Duncan 36. The Two Pipers: Romanticism, Postmodernism, and the Cliché, Orrin N. C. Wang Part 10 Sciences of Mind, Body, and Nature 37. Coleridge and the New Unconscious, Alan Richardson 38. John Clare’s Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton 39. The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life, Denise Gigante 40. Romantic Transformation: Literature and Science, Sharon Ruston Part 11 Literature, Media, Mediation 41. Ballads and Bards: British Romantic Orality, Maureen McLane 42. Processing, Andrew Piper 43. If This is Enlightenment Then What is Romanticism?, Clifford Siskin and William Warner 44. Romantic Long Poems in Victorian Anthologies, Tom Mole
Biography
Mark Canuel is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He is author of Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime (2012), The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment (2007), and Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830 (2002).
"Overall, this is a strong and absorbing anthology, one that can provide newcomers with a thorough introduction to the field of professionals with a convenient reference ready to hand. It collects the work of genuine leaders in the field. ... The book is by its very nature and thus inevitably, a treasure trove of groundbreaking insights into British Romanticism." -- David Sigler,University of Calgary, Modern Philology
