The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s

The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s
Author: Paul Keen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1999-11-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139426486

This book offers an original study of the debates which arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature. Paul Keen shows how these debates were situated at the intersection of the French Revolution and a more gradual revolution in information and literacy reflecting the aspirations of the professional classes in eighteenth-century England. He shows these movements converging in hostility to a new class of readers, whom critics saw as dangerously subject to the effects of seditious writings or the vagaries of literary fashion. The first part of the book concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists, radical women authors, and the Orientalists, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790-1910

The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790-1910
Author: Marguérite Corporaal
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042029994

This volume of essays by scholars in the field of English and American studies brings together a variety of perspectives on the utopian literature originating from cultural communities from 1790-1910. Ranging from the Lunar society to the Nationalist movement, and from the Transcendentalists to the Indian Monday Club the fifteen peer-reviewed articles examine a wide range of contexts in which utopian literature was written, and will be of interest to scholars in the field of cultural and literary studies alike. Moreover, the volume presents the reader with a unique overview of developments in Utopian thinking and literature throughout the long nineteenth century. Specific attention is paid to the transatlantic nature of cultural communities in which utopian writings were produced and read as well as to the colonial contexts of nineteenth-century utopian literature. As such, the collection offers a novel approach to a tradition of utopian writing that was essentially transcultural. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Evert Jan van Leeuwen (Leiden University) are lecturers in English and American literature in the Netherlands.

Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870

Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870
Author: Dr Julia M Wright
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1409478858

Exploring the ways in which transatlantic relationships functioned in the nineteenth century to unsettle hierarchical models of gender, race, and national and cultural differences, this collection demonstrates the generative potential of transatlantic studies to loosen demographic frames and challenge conveniently linear histories. The contributors take up a rich and varied range of topics, including Charlotte Smith's novelistic treatment of the American Revolution, The Old Manor House; Anna Jameson's counter-discursive constructions of gender in a travelogue; Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the 'Queer Atlantic'; representations of indigenous religion and shamanism in British Romantic literary discourse; the mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionist movement; the transatlantic adventure novel; the exchanges of transatlantic print culture facilitated by the Minerva Press; British and Anglo-American representations of Niagara Falls; and Charles Brockden Brown's intervention in the literature of exploration. Taken together, the essays underscore the strategic power of the concept of the transatlantic to enable new perspectives on the politics of gender, race, and cultural difference as manifested in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America.

The Revolution in Popular Literature

The Revolution in Popular Literature
Author: Ian Haywood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2004-07-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521835466

This book takes a new look at the evolution of popular literature in Britain in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Making use of a wide range of archival and primary sources, he argues that radical politics played a decisive role in the transformation of popular literature. By charting the key moments in the history of 'cheap' literature, the book casts new light on the many neglected popular genres and texts: the 'pig's meat' anthology, the female-authored didactic tale, and Chartist fiction.

The Cosmopolitan Ideal

The Cosmopolitan Ideal
Author: Michael Scrivener
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317315618

Examines the new internationalism which emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. This is the study of cosmopolitanism, which takes into account feminist and post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment. It also offers cosmopolitanism as a solution to contemporary struggles to reach a post-national political identity.

Sociable Places

Sociable Places
Author: Kevin Gilmartin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110817941X

Ranging across literature, theater, history, and the visual arts, this collection of essays by leading scholars in the field explores the range of places where British Romantic-period sociability transpired. The book considers how sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms, buildings, landscapes and seascapes where people gathered to converse, to eat and drink, to work and to find entertainment. At the same time, it is clear that sociability shaped place, both in the deliberate construction and configuration of venues for people to gather, and in the way such gatherings transformed how place was experienced and understood. The essays highlight literary and aesthetic experience but also range through popular entertainment and ordinary forms of labor and leisure.

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions
Author: A. Jarrells
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2005-08-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230503292

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. The book argues that at a time when the political nature of the Bloodless Revolution became a subject of debate - in the period defined by France's famously bloody revolution - 'Literature' emerged as a kind of political institution and constituted a bloodless revolution in its own right.

The Romantic Crowd

The Romantic Crowd
Author: Mary Fairclough
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107031699

A study of how the instinctive behaviour of crowds was understood by literary writers of the Romantic period.

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism
Author: Andrew M. Stauffer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2005-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139444794

The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as English men and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine and the law and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, Stauffer charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self. In their poetry and prose, Romantic authors including Blake, Coleridge, Godwin, Shelley and Byron negotiate the meanings of indignation and rage amidst a clamourous debate over the place of anger in art and in civil society. This innovative book has much to contribute to the understanding of Romantic literature and the cultural history of the emotions.