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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
  • Cited by 8
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2009
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9781139055970
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521790079
Subjects:
Literature, British History: General Interest, British History after 1450, History, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
The New Cambridge History of English Literature
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Romantic period was one of the most creative, intense and turbulent periods of English literature, an age marked by revolution, reaction and reform in politics, and by the invention of imaginative literature in its distinctively modern form. This History presents an engaging account of six decades of literary production around the turn of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the most up-to-date research, the essays are designed both to provide a narrative of Romantic literature and to offer new and stimulating readings of the key texts. One group of essays addresses the various locations of literary activity – both in England and, as writers developed their interests in travel and foreign cultures, across the world. A second set of essays traces how texts responded to great historical and social change. With a comprehensive bibliography, timeline and index, this volume is an important resource for research and teaching in the field.

Reviews

‘Fifty years ago, literary studies was awash in big theories of Romanticism, created by the likes of M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom; two decades later, Marilyn Butler argued that the very label ‘Romantic' was ‘historically unsound'. This collection suggests that no consensus has yet emerged: instead, the best of the essays suggest continuities with periods before and after. Rather than big theories, the contributors present kaleidoscopic snapshots of individual genres (the novel, the ‘new poetry', drama, the ballad, children's literature); larger intellectual currents (John Brewer writes exceptionally well on ‘sentiment and sensibility'); currently fashionable topics (imperialism, publishing history, disciplinarity); and - most interesting - the varying cultures of discrete localities (London, Ireland, Scotland). The result is an excellent book useful … for its summaries of early twenty-first-century thinking about British literary culture from the 1770s to the 1830s.'

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 25 - Representation restructured
    pp 579-600
  • View abstract

    Summary

    John Stuart Mill, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, observes that 'these two men', though 'they agreed in being closet-students'. Mill's account helps to bring out certain similarities in their projects. Both were crucial participants in a massive change in the understanding of representation that occurred within their lives and those of their Romantic contemporaries. The various different kinds of attention to representation, essayistic evaluation, the contribution of acceptance by an audience, and detailed analysis of the differences between one use of language and another, help to indicate the extent to which the Romantics restructured representation. Didacticism, conceived as the effort to promulgate particular beliefs in literary works, came to seem less like an unpleasant option and more like an unavailable one. While Bentham sought to evaluate individual actions in relation to systematic social action, Shelley repeatedly described poetry as lending 'systematic form' to social imagination.
  • 26 - Romantic cultural imperialism
    pp 601-620
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Scholars gradually recognize that most of the major writers of the Romantic period had at least a passing flirtation with the most prominent cultural component of imperialism, namely, Orientalism. Nature poetry, suggests that Orientalism helped to define political, social and cultural practices in areas far removed from the East itself. the most successful Orientalist tales or pictures in the Romantic period, of which Byron would later claim to provide the finest 'samples' depended upon a sometimes jarring discrepancy. The concept of the sovereign Western subject would prove essential to the work of the empire-builders of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth's struggle is therefore to rescue Poetry from being merely 'a matter of amusement and idle pleasure', as though a taste for Poetry were as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry'. Orientalism, then, was hardly just a thematic 'sideshow' for Romantic poetry.
  • 27 - Romanticism and religious modernity: from natural supernaturalism to literary sectarianism
    pp 621-647
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Romanticism becomes a spiritual dispensation, an individual or coterie struggle to come to terms with the eclipse of shared Christian doctrines. Reclaiming visionary Romanticism as a spiritual exercise did not yield agreement on the extent to which an apocalypse transferred to consciousness or to nature actually sustained Christian faith. English literary Romanticism as a discrete aesthetic project worked out across two generations by a visionary company of male poets has given way to an interest in the many other voices that found expression in the Romantic period. As the older Dissenting congregations tended just to hold their numbers or even to decline during the Romantic period, growth and expansive activism was achieved elsewhere, in a more emotional register and often at the lower end of the social scale, with the rise of Evangelical piety. Before there was 'Romanticism' there were a host of contemporary sectarian literary designations, conceived in antagonism and sustained in debate.
  • 28 - Is Romanticism finished?
    pp 648-664
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Romanticism is a doomed tradition, yet a perpetually self-renewing one. The novel, Disgrace's central character, David Lurie, is an academic, a literary scholar, a Romanticist, in fact. Coetzee develops an interpretation of European Romanticism. His book is thus in great measure a satiric investigation of a wide range of Romantic ideologies, from Wordsworthian sincerity, on one end, to Byronic intellectual flamboyance on the other. If Romanticism is perpetually 'doomed' and perpetually 'self-renewing', those reciprocities draw on a common energy source: imaginative scepticism. Hemans poem locates not a sceptical deficiency but the exact form of Hemans's Romanticism. 'Byron' and 'The Sceptic' are magical mirrors giving Hemans access to that dreadful Christian situation within which Hemans's special Romanticism exfoliates: the Romanticism of maternal fear and anxiety. Romantic works flourish all about us in popular and highbrow art, music, and writing.

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