Atesede Makonnen’s “Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race” argues that not only did the Romantic novel take up questions about race, but the novel form was itself racialized during the Romantic era. Makonnen studies in particular Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld, who attempted to taxonomize various “species” of prose in a mirror of the categorization central to that of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial philosophy and science. For both Reeve and Barbauld, the evolution of the modern novel is a move away from other forms – tales and fables, for instance – linked to the primitive and non-European. Thus, both writers link literary development as a mark of cultural, national, and, implicitly, racial progress.

This chapter examines the series of prose romances that William Morris wrote in the 1850s, 1880s and 1890s and that were rediscovered in the twentieth century by writers, editors and critics of fantasy. The first section, ‘Romance and Fantasy’, recovers the moment of Morris’s canonisation as the ‘inventor’ of imaginary-world fantasy and briefly considers his influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, before tracing fantasy’s roots back to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century definitions of the romance genre. The second and third sections, ‘The Romances of the 1890s and the Germanic Romances’ and ‘The Political Romances and the Romances of the 1850s’, provide an overview of the key formal and thematic characteristics of Morris’s texts, proceeding in reverse order from his final medievalist fantasies, via his socialist timeslip dream visions to the short-form romances of his student days. These sections highlight the variable significance of communalism at different stages of Morris’s writing career and introduce comparisons with contemporary works by Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy. The final section of the chapter offers a case study of The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), focusing on the themes of mortality and kinship.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate, and the sexual aspects of fairy activity, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances and became the background to late medieval popular belief.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.