This book tells the story of the bitter feud between the Duchess of Kingston and the actor, Samuel Foote, which resulted in a pair of scandalous trials in London in the revolutionary year of 1776.
Using postmodern theory, The Practice of Quixotism explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which typically demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read.
A constellation of new essays on authorship, politics and history, British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History presents the latest thinking about the debates raised by scholarship on gender and women's writing in the long eighteenth century.
This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius.
This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including the discursive type favoured by Pope and the familiar and dramatic epistles.
By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.
This new edition offers an extensive editor's introduction, a fully annotated text of the first edition of Vindiciae Gallicae and an appendix which includes the significant substantive revisions that Mackintosh made to Vindiciae Gallicae in the late summer of 1791.
This book concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.
This new collection of essays by major scholars in the field looks at the ways in which cross-fertilization has taken place in Gothic writing from France, Germany, Britain and America over the last 200 years, and argues that Gothic writing reflects international exchanges in theme and form.
This book explores the false starts and disturbances of Romantic writing in Britain - 'misfits' and misfittings - as both a constitutive challenge to canonical romanticism and a distinctive literary field worth examining on its own account.
This book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made the British literary heritage a source of national pride.
Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond.
In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women.
To better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror.
McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies.
The first study dedicated to the relationship between Alexander Pope and George Berkeley, this book undertakes a comparative reading of their work on the visual environment, economics and providence, challenging current ideas of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in early eighteenth-century Britain.
Beckett's Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British eighteenth century and of the influence of its writers on his work.
Following the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, ideas of the 'Natural Rights of Man' (later distinguished into particular issues like rights of association, rights of women, slaves, children and animals) were publicly debated in England.
In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, British writers saw the narrative ordering of experience as either superficial, dangerous or impossible.
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility argues that participants in the late eighteenth-century slavery debate developed a distinct sentimental rhetoric, using the language of the heart to powerful effect in the most important political and humanitarian battle of the time.
Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence.
Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century.
John Clare, Politics and Poetry challenges the traditional portrait of 'poor John Clare', the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance.
Britain's Bloodless Revolutions explores the relationship of the emerging category of Literature to the emerging threat of popular violence between the Bloodless Revolution and the Romantic turn from revolution to reform.
This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more accurate understanding of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers.
Necromanticism is a study of literary pilgrimage: readers' compulsion to visit literary homes, landscapes, and (especially) graves during the long Romantic period.
Contextualizing the topos of the neglected child within a variety of discourses, this book challenges the assumption that the early nineteenth century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan to a liberating approach to children and demonstrates that oppressive assumptions survive in major texts considered part of the Romantic cult of childhood.
Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering.
This collection by leading scholars in the field provides a fascinating and ground-breaking introduction to current research in Irish Romantic studies.
Contributing to the growth in plagiarism studies, this timely new book highlights the impact of the allegation of plagiarism on the working lives of some of the major writers of the period, and considers plagiarism in relation to the emergence of literary copyright and the aesthetic of originality.
The categories of authenticity and sincerity, treated sceptically since the early twentieth century, remain indispensable for the study of Romantic literature and culture.
Long confounded with a monolithic British entity or misrepresented as 'Lakers' and 'Cockneys', the diverse regional forms of 'English Romanticism' are ripe for reassessment.
Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.
