Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

Chapter Sixteen argues that late-Romantic literature also reflects Europe’s new global consciousness, a product of the modern nation-state rather than of cosmopolitanism. What Goethe referred to as Weltliteratur is updated here as global literature. The chapter first defends the historical and theoretical application of globalisation to the Romantic context, linking it with the development of nationalism and imperialism, and in particular the increasingly transnational book trade. It then analyses this ‘global imaginary’ from a British perspective in Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Felicia Hemans’ Records of Woman. These texts show among other things how Britons reacted to their nation’s new global power and interconnectedness, which made them feel more dependent and vulnerable, but also contributed to a sense of ‘global sociality’. The last section briefly looks at how other European literatures likewise reflected their national as well as imperial anxieties in the wake of Napoleon, examining Scott’s influence abroad in a novel by de la Motte Fouqué.

In 1772 Joseph Banks recorded observations on the Hebridean island of Staffa. His most striking ‘discovery’ was a sea cave resembling a cathedral. Banks claimed the cave was known by the name of the mythical Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Fingal, to use the variant made famous by Macpherson’s Ossian poems. The publication of Banks’s findings prompted a small industry of travel writing that combined lithic observations with minstrelsy and national history. In 1797 the French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published his research on the topic, which suggested that the association with Ossian was the result of a misunderstanding: whereas the Gaelic for Fingal’s Cave would be ‘an-ua-fine’, the actual name was ‘an-ua-vine’, which translated as ‘melodious cave’. Far from settling the matter, Saint-Fond’s intervention only added to the mystique. In this chapter I argue that the cave’s fashionable status can be partly attributed to a series of re-soundings, by which printed texts and theatrical performances relayed aspects of on-site accounts to new readers and audiences. Where existing models of Romantic resonance have emphasized a correspondence between sound and thought, the fame of Fingal’s Cave emerges here as the result of almost mindless repetition.

This chapter investigates the formal and generic experimentation of four late poems that rework the concerns of the Lyrical Ballads for the new contexts – public and private – of the late 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Several intertwined themes run through my discussion: Wordsworth’s efforts to set his new poems in a circle of writers and readers, substituting for the old Grasmere circle but more socially conventional; his critical response to the tales and romances of Scott and Hemans; his renewed interest in people, especially women, who, by virtue of dwelling at or beyond society’s borders, communicate with or embody the world of death, and the feminism of this interest and the limitations of this feminism.

No era of polar history has received more attention than the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Its three most famous explorers – Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and Ernest Shackleton – have been the subjects not only of academic research, but also of novels, plays, films, television programmes, and exhibitions at major museums. Rather than retelling in detail a familiar story, this chapter will trace how the history of the Heroic Age has evolved over the past century or so. Its core argument is that the very features which made it so compelling in the first decades of the twentieth century have made its place in recent European and American culture more problematic. It will conclude by suggesting a new way of thinking about the Heroic Age.

The discovery of the McMurdo Dry Valleys was an accidental result of the desire in polar exploration to find the South Magnetic Pole and the South Geographic Pole. James Clark Ross was astonished in 1841, after pushing his way through a thick collar of pack ice, to suddenly sail into an open body of water, McMurdo Sound, finding a large island (Ross Island) like Hawaii formed by a series of several large volcanoes, one of which was smoking and ready to erupt. He came here to find the South Magnetic Pole, which was too far inland to the west to reach easily on foot, as he had done years earlier in reaching the North Magnetic Pole. This opened the way for Robert Falcon Scott to come here in 1902–1904 with his Discovery expedition to make and attempt on the Pole. He set up camp on Ross Island and stayed for two years exploring various ways to reach the Pole. Albert Armitage, one his men, pushed a route directly west to see what was there and was astonished to find large valleys fully free of ice and snow, the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

The poet’s conservative revisioning of the Swiss myth is developed in Chapter Six, which looks at Restoration-period representations of Switzerland, unearthing what Paul Hamilton calls the ‘political imaginary’ of the Restoration. After discussing the country’s socio-political situation as well as changes between the Grand Tour and modern tourism, I explore how Whig and Tory travelers alike, including Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Mackintosh, Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Francis Jeffrey tried to revive their liberal hopes in Switzerland after 1814 by revisiting Whiggish topoi, but also by meditating over the ruins of revolution. I then look at Hemans’s and Scott’s late Romantic representations of the Swiss myth as a model of Christian patriotism and domestic attachment, yet one which never completely sheds its residual significance as a democratic trope. Drawing on Switzerland’s medieval past, and notably on the story of William Tell and on the wars of liberation, their texts offer a paradoxical mix of conservative and progressive values, or what I call Restoration republicanism.

The final, two-part chapter treats the arc of Wordsworth’s poetry after 1820 up to his final volume of original poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, in 1842. Treating explicitly the issue of Wordsworth’s age and the issue of the “late Wordsworth,” the first part of this chapter takes up his process of retrospection – looking back at his life – and re-collection – changing, reordering, and recombining his literary corpus. It touches upon the Ecclesiastical Sketches and Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems.The second part treats “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837,” an account Wordsworth’s long-delayed tripto Italy. Ironically, during the period of Wordsworth’s life when his poetry strikes us as being the least compelling aesthetically, he was probably at his most persuasive as a force within his own culture and society. Cox shows that the Italian memorials are an opportunity for Wordsworth to assert the power of his poetry in confronting not only a powerful cultural Other in Catholic Italy but also an Other Italy found or invented by Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and particularly Byron, ironically his younger precursors on this ground. Taking up topics from Wordsworth’s relationship to tourism to the religious valence of these last poems, this chapter concludes the overall argument that “late” Wordsworth developed in response to his younger contemporaries.

This chapter reassesses the role of the novel in producing an economy of scale within which to picture the eighteenth-century body, under colonial conditions. It suggests that the novel of the period is driven by two imperatives, at once to produce an expanded picture of the body at a remove from itself and to produce an opposite image of a bound, organically complete body, which is proof against the alienating effects of colonial distance. The chapter then goes on to explore the first of these two drives, as it is expressed in the novel from from Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift and Sarah Scott.

The movement to abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia continued unabated in the latter 1840s, now with the gag rule removed. Slavery placed increasing stresses on the nation as a whole, and Congress responded by passing the Compromise of 1850. One feature of this agreement was the suppression of the D.C. slave trade, which effectively shuttered William H. Williams’ Yellow House. The chapter ends by briefly recounting the careers of Williams’ slave–trading associates Rudolph Littlejohn, Ebenezer Rodbird, Joshua Staples, Nathaniel Boush, and, in greater detail, his brother Thomas Williams.