The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose
Author: British Academy Global Professor Robert Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 993
Release: 2024-09-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198834543

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Recognizing the Romantic Novel

Recognizing the Romantic Novel
Author: Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1846315026

The field of literature changed dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century, as under the shadow of Romanticism the novel became the most important literary genre of its day. Often neglected, the novels of the Romantic era puzzle critics yet are much more concerned with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncanny than their immediate predecessors or successors, and their authors include some of the most important novelists of British literary history—Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott among them. Featuring contributions from distinguished scholars in the field, Recognizing the Romantic Novel evaluates the vibrancy and centrality of the Romantic novel, showcasing the important new voices and directions in the field and showing it can hold its own in the canon of literary scholarship. “These essays offer us a lens through which we may recognize the Romantic novel as it has never been recognized before.”—Times Literary Supplement