Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800

The Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets.

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent.

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s.

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 volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis.

This book is a study of war and the perceptions of war.

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.

This study argues that protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s.

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.

Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature.

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.

The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law is a study of the radical novel's critique of the evolving social contract in the 1790s.

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.

Becoming the Gentleman explains why British citizens in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman.

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.

The eighteenth century saw the birth of the concept of literature as business: literature critiqued and promoted capitalism, and books themselves became highly marketable canonical objects.

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.

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity.

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.

At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems.

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.

Romanticism is taught at universities across the globe and is considered integral to the study of British and European literature.

Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s discusses the work of three prominent women writers by focusing on the response to the French Revolution and the struggle for reform in Britain.

This studyargues that female networks of conversation, correspondenceand patronage formed the foundation for women's work in the 'higher' realms of Shakespeare criticism and poetry.

Exploring the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture, these essays use the trope of haunting and spectrality as a critical tool with which to consider neo-Victorian works, as well as our ongoing fascination with the Victorians, combining original readings of well-known novels with engaging analyses of lesser-known works.

Through an examination of his later personal notebooks, this study explores the reciprocal effects that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's scientific explorations, philosophical convictions, theological beliefs, and states of health exerted upon his perceptions of human Body/Soul relations, both in life and after death.

This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies.

A comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Byron, entries range from detailed coverage of the major poems to items on Byron's songs, conversation, interest in boxing, swimming and vampires, and sexual liaisons; also the 'Byronic Hero', Byron in fiction and drama, and his pervasive influence on subsequent literature.

This book analyzes the relation between print cultures and eighteenth-century literary and political practices and, identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, offers readings of key texts that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres.

This revised new edition of The Handbook of the Gothic contains over one hundred entries on Gothic writers, themes, terms, concepts, contexts and locations, featuring new entries on writers including Stephen King and Wilkie Collins, new genres and a new Preface which situates the handbook within current studies of the Gothic.

Building on recent work on Victorian print culture and the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, this collection extends the frontiers of scholarship on the 'Atlantic scene' of publishing, exploring new ways of grappling with the rapidly changing universe of print at the turn of the twentieth century.

This innovative and ground-breaking study explores the complex relationship between linguistic theory and literature during the Romantic period, focusing particularly on William Hazlitt's writings about linguistic theory and also considering figures such as Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.

This exciting new study examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - revealing the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers.

Looking at the novels of James's major phase in the context of fin-de-siecle decadence, this book illuminates central issues in the James corpus and central aspects of a rich and fraught cultural moment.