A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.
Moving away from traditional studies of Gothic domesticity based on symbolism, Soon instead focuses on domestic space's material presence and the traces it leaves on the human subjects inhabiting it.
Combining historical poetics and book history, Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries shows Romanticism as characterized by tropes and forms that were jointly produced by literary circles.
In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia.
This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought.
This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake's poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson.
Examining chameleonic identities as seen in theatrical performances and literary texts during the Romantic period, this study explores cultural attitudes toward imposture and how it reveals important and much-debated issues about this time period.
Scholarly interest in 'the Irish Gothic' has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, but the debate over exactly what constitutes this body of literature remains far from settled.
Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?
Presented here, for the first time since their publication over a century ago, are twelve previously unknown published works of fiction, poetry, and journalistic writing by Bram Stoker (1847-1912), three works never before reprinted, twelve period writings about Stoker, and the rare 1913 estate sale catalogue of his personal library.
Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the 'second Shakespeare' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett.
By identifying a pervasive cultivation of attention as a perceptual and cognitive state in eighteenth-century poetry, this book explores overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention.
Examining popular contexts of Greek revivalism associated with women, Comet challenges the masculine narrative of English Classicism by demonstrating that it thrived in non-male spaces, as an ephemeral ideal that betrayed a distrust of democratic rhetoric that ignored the social inequities of the classical world.
Social Reform in Gothic Writing provides a transatlantic view of the politically transformative power that Gothic texts effected during the Revolutionary era (1764-1834) through providing fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical writing in a wide variety of genres.
Through a close analysis of the pamphlets, reviews, lectures, journalism, editorials, poems, and novels surrounding the introduction of the gold standard in 1816, this book examines the significance of monetary policy and economic debate to the culture and literature of Britain during the age of Romanticism.
As theatres expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers.
Examining the work of three authors: Richardson, Haywood and Burney, and their representation of domestic space, this book argues that to make such spaces accessible to modern readers they need to have information of the real domestic.
The proper organisation of rural communities was central to political and social debates at the turn of the eighteenth century, and featured strongly in the 1790s political polemic that influenced so many Romantic poets and novelists.
Material Culture and Sedition, 1688-1760 is a groundbreaking study of the ways in which material culture (and its associated designs, rituals and symbols) was used to avoid prosecution for treason and sedition in the British Isles.
A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters.
This book argues that the term 'Romanticism' should be more culturally-inclusive, recognizing the importance of scientific and medical ideas that helped shape some of the key concepts of the period, such as natural rights, the creative imagination and the sublime.
Austen'sUnbecomingConjunctions is a contemporary study of all Jane Austen's writings focusing on her representation of women, sexuality, the material objects, and linguistic patterns by which this sexuality was expressed.
In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.
This work includes the complete authoritative text with biographical & historical contexts, critical history and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives.
Lee unfolds the stories of six women with a cast of supporting characters such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Stamford Raffles and Napoleon against the grand narrative of England's 18th century empire building.
This study of the afterlife of Robinson Crusoe offers insights into the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story and how modern conceptions of childhood are shaped by nostalgia and ideas of 'the popular'.
Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century.
Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.
