Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing

Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing
Author: Neil Ramsey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009121324

Military literature was one of the most prevalent forms of writing to appear during the Romantic era, yet its genesis in this period is often overlooked. Ranging from histories to military policy, manuals, and a new kind of imaginative war literature in military memoirs and novels, modern war writing became a highly influential body of professional writing. Drawing on recent research into the entanglements of Romanticism with its wartime trauma and revisiting Michel Foucault's ground-breaking work on military discipline and the biopolitics of modern war, this book argues that military literature was deeply reliant upon Romantic cultural and literary thought and the era's preoccupations with the body, life, and writing. Simultaneously, it shows how military literature runs parallel to other strands of Romantic writing, forming a sombre shadow against which Romanticism took shape and offering its own exhortations for how to manage the life and vitality of the nation.

War and Literary Studies

War and Literary Studies
Author: Anders Engberg-Pedersen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 740
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100905998X

War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our attention to the relation between warfare and literary studies as a field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to the way we engage with war and trauma or war and sensation? In which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical theory, French postwar theory, postcolonial theory shaped by war? How might emergent concepts such as 'revolution,' 'the anthropocene' or 'capitalism' inflect the study of war and literature?

Staël, Romanticism and Revolution

Staël, Romanticism and Revolution
Author: John Claiborne Isbell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009362720

Combating two centuries of sexism, this radical overview of Staël in context reveals a major player in Revolution and Romanticism.

Wordsworth After War

Wordsworth After War
Author: Philip Shaw
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-07-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100936314X

William Wordsworth's later poetry complicates possibilities of life and art in war's aftermath. This illuminating study provides new perspectives and reveals how his work following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars reflects a passionate, lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace. Focusing on works from between 1814 and 1822, Philip Shaw constructs a unique and compelling account of how Wordsworth, in both his ongoing poetic output and in his revisions to earlier works, sought to modify, refute, and sometimes sustain his early engagement with these issues as both an artist and a political thinker. In an engaging style, Shaw reorients our understanding of the later writings of a major British poet and the post-war literary culture in which his reputation was forged. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel

Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel
Author: Olivia Ferguson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2023-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009274260

A counter-intuitive history of literary caricature, exploring how caricature helped make the realist novel in the Romantic period.

Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era

Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era
Author: Hannah Doherty Hudson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009321919

Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Orientation in European Romanticism

Orientation in European Romanticism
Author: Paul Hamilton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009268244

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire
Author: Matthew Leporati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009285173

Matthew Leporati examines the explosive Romantic revival of epic alongside the contemporary revival of missionary activity. His study contributes to charged political debates around British imperialism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Late Romanticism and the End of Politics

Late Romanticism and the End of Politics
Author: John Havard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009289179

In the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again.

Sound and Sense in British Romanticism

Sound and Sense in British Romanticism
Author: James Grande
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009277847

A captivating exploration of the newly reimagined world of sound and sense in Britain in the decades around 1800.