Blackwell History of Literature in English S.
1 total work
The Blackwell Histories of English Literature: General Editor Peter BrownRomanticismGary KellyThe volume on Romanticism in Blackwell's History of Literature in English surveys critically the range of writing in Britain during the Romantic period, describes the development of Romanticism as a literary movement, and places it in cultural, social, and political context.
Since literature as we still understand it was largely a construction of Romanticism, the book necessarily reconsiders the range of writing circulated and produced during the Romantic period, from the "street literature" of plebeian culture to "high" literature of elite and learned culture, and ranging through the amateur writing of the miscellany magazines, the new "classics" created by reprint publishers, the controversial writing that proliferated in an age of crisis and public debate, the writing of novelty and fashionable consumption, the contrasting writing of originality and experiment, the rapidly diversifying field of dramatic literature in relation to changes in the institution of the theatre, and the many kinds of writing that invented and enabled the sovereign subject of the modern state set in a "national" topography, culture, and history. The book surveys this field of writing and print, which contained and defined the field of literature, critically and historically, as a field of struggle between contending interests in a period of profound and complex revolutionary change.
As this remark indicates, questions of social difference, particularly gender, class, "race," and region, are centrally relevant throughout this examination of Romanticism in context. The approach here, then, is that of a temporalised taxonomy, alert to structural relationships between styles and genres and to change in those elements and their relationships in the context of social and cultural difference, conflict, and transformation. Genre, style, and discourse are understood here in the way Roy Harris proposes that language itself works: as learned codes (not rule-sets) circulating in a public culture, adapted by writers to address (and re-form) a reading public, and used by readers to assimilate a new work in their own interests, including material interests, and agency in a world that is experienced as divided and conflicted. As a narrative, the volume describes the development of literary Romanticism from the later eighteenth century through the first third of the nineteenth century.
The volume first establishes a context of terms, issues, and questions for examining what we now know as Romanticism: the re is a description of the conditions of circulation for Romantic texts in a particular material culture of writing, print, and the book, and of the particular formation, or re-formation of the English language for the public sphere at this time. The volume next considers the sources of Romanticism in the Enlightenments and Sensibility, particularly the Enlightenments' discourses of culture and society and Sensibility's discourses of subjectivity and the social (and political) body, singling out themes and textual practices more than examining individual works or authors. Now the book takes up the particularities of Romanticism in process. First it examines the impact of the political and discursive crisis of the Revolution debate and Napoleonic global war, especially the radically destabilising effects of those events on ideas of language and literary form, and their ability to embody and disseminate meaning and value.
The book then turns to what emerges prominently from this crisis in the discursive order--the construction, from the 1790s to the early 1820s, of a "national" identity, history, culture, and (imperial) destiny in the face of prolonged external threat and internal regional and social division and conflict. Finally, this central section of the book describes the role of literature, as reformulated in Romanticism, in enabling the formation of the modern liberal state, from the 1810s and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic aftermath, through major correspondences with Continental European Romantic liberalism, to the early 1830s and the coinciding emergence of the modern Romantic canon, the institution of a national literature, and the reconstruction of the franchised political nation to be more or less congruent with the (adult male) reading public. The book closes with an account of the various (and contradictory) Romanticisms constructed for the needs of the liberal states which Romanticism did much to enable in the first place The following, then, is a chapter outline of the book.
Each chapter opens with general remarks on issues, contexts, and developments, and then proceeds to consider genres, sub-genres, and clusters of discourses in relation to individual authors, texts, and coteries, schools, factions, or groups, as seems appropriate for the particular chapter. Each chapter will be about 20,000 words in length. 1. Romanticism: Definitions, Issues, Conditions, and Contexts: (a) Definitions, Issues, and Questions: the idea (and problematics) of literary periods: history of "romantic," "romanticism," and related terms in literary history and criticism: relation of the cultural and the political (was Romanticism a displacement of the political into the aesthetic?): Romanticism in relation to other movements in its time (Utilitarianism, Evangelicalism: reform: liberalism): the persistence of the obsolete (co-existence of Romanticism with "residual" literary movements): Romanticism and modernisation: Romanticism in the late twentieth century.
(b) Romantic Texts, Books, Readers, and Writers: the material culture of books and texts: "text" and "work": the book trade of the time: copyright, authorship, and entrepreneurship: the market for books: the "rise of the reading public" (or reading publics): production and distribution of books: kinds of books-as-material-objects: rise of the reprints leading to national canons: the importance of the commercial circulating libraries: magazine culture, from amateurism to professional authorship: producers and consumers, writers and readers, expression and interpretation: the rise of the modern author: Romanticism--an ideology of the author as sovereign subject? of the reading public as subjects in silent correspondence? the discursive order and print culture from Enlightenment to Reform Bill: hierarchies of genres, gendering of genres, inversion of the historic generic order(c) Questions of Language: standardisation of the "national" language and the marginalisation of dialects and sociolects: professionalisation of public language and its effect on the ability of subaltern groups to have a public voice: representation of speech in writing(d) Sources, Resources, and Revisions: the Enlightenments and Sensibility: the Enlightenments' interest in culture, modernisation, history, materialist epistemology, and human self-transformation taken up by Romanticism, revised in crisis: the culture of Sensibility: body and mind, socialisation and acculturation of the individual, move from ascribed (social) to inherent (subjective) identity, poetics and politics of expressivity: the revolutionised and revolutionary consciousness: coterie culture and revolutionary vanguards: education and reform: writers for children: beyond Enlightenment and Sensibility: plebeian print and customary culture, piety and provincialism2.
Revolution and the Crisis of Discourse. Revolution and the opening of the discursive order: Burke, Paine, Mackintosh: the Della Cruscans (with Charlotte Smith): from Sentimental to Revolutionary poetics: representing Revolution: Helen Maria Williams, Dr John Moore, and political tourism: dramatising reform and revolution: Holcroft, Cowley, and Inchbald: constructing readings publics: the "analytical" reviews and professional intellectual culture: the "new philosophy": Godwin and Holcroft: Revolutionary feminism: Wollstonecraft and Hays: the English Jacobin novel and the Anti-Jacobin novel (Holcroft, Inchbald, Robinson, Smith, Bage, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Lamb, Hamilton and other burlesque writers): contra-verse: Barlow, Robinson, Williams, Thelwall, Southey, Mathias, Anti-Jacobin burlesque: popular and pseudo-popular politics: Spence, Eaton, Lee, and Hannah More3. The Revolutionary Aftermath and Romantic Nationalism.
Dramatic conciliations: Baillie and neo-sentimental drama: counter-revolutionary feminism: Hannah More: social sympathy and personal restoration: Wordsworth and Coleridge from 1798 to 1814: writing Britain and the United Kingdom: Edgeworth, Hamilton, and Owenson: "national" history and biographical romance: the Porter sisters: reformed subjects: writers for children, mainly women: fantasies of the plebs: Legh Richmond, the Religious Tract Society, literature of social surveillance and control: the great patriotic poetic war: Campbell, Hemans: the professionalisation of magazine culture: the Edinburgh Magazine, Quarterly Review, and others: patriotic classics: the "British Dramatists, Novelists," etc.: the persistence of English Jacobinism and the emergence of literary liberalism: satires on the establishment, Byron and P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Godwin (still): novel subjects: Austen anticipates the modern state4. Romanticism, Reform, and the Modern State.
Opening section: the Continental European context of restoration, reaction, and revolt, with its literature, and British sympathy with yet self-distinction from Continental politics and literary Romanticism: national historiography and historical fiction, drama, and verse narrative: Scott, Byron, Moore, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Hemans: magazines of imagined communities (and sub-communities): the London Magazine, Westminster, Fraser's, the "ladies'" magazines, the "mechanics'" magazines, religious magazines: Romantic subjectivities: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Landon, Disraeli: the embourgeoisement of town and coun
Since literature as we still understand it was largely a construction of Romanticism, the book necessarily reconsiders the range of writing circulated and produced during the Romantic period, from the "street literature" of plebeian culture to "high" literature of elite and learned culture, and ranging through the amateur writing of the miscellany magazines, the new "classics" created by reprint publishers, the controversial writing that proliferated in an age of crisis and public debate, the writing of novelty and fashionable consumption, the contrasting writing of originality and experiment, the rapidly diversifying field of dramatic literature in relation to changes in the institution of the theatre, and the many kinds of writing that invented and enabled the sovereign subject of the modern state set in a "national" topography, culture, and history. The book surveys this field of writing and print, which contained and defined the field of literature, critically and historically, as a field of struggle between contending interests in a period of profound and complex revolutionary change.
As this remark indicates, questions of social difference, particularly gender, class, "race," and region, are centrally relevant throughout this examination of Romanticism in context. The approach here, then, is that of a temporalised taxonomy, alert to structural relationships between styles and genres and to change in those elements and their relationships in the context of social and cultural difference, conflict, and transformation. Genre, style, and discourse are understood here in the way Roy Harris proposes that language itself works: as learned codes (not rule-sets) circulating in a public culture, adapted by writers to address (and re-form) a reading public, and used by readers to assimilate a new work in their own interests, including material interests, and agency in a world that is experienced as divided and conflicted. As a narrative, the volume describes the development of literary Romanticism from the later eighteenth century through the first third of the nineteenth century.
The volume first establishes a context of terms, issues, and questions for examining what we now know as Romanticism: the re is a description of the conditions of circulation for Romantic texts in a particular material culture of writing, print, and the book, and of the particular formation, or re-formation of the English language for the public sphere at this time. The volume next considers the sources of Romanticism in the Enlightenments and Sensibility, particularly the Enlightenments' discourses of culture and society and Sensibility's discourses of subjectivity and the social (and political) body, singling out themes and textual practices more than examining individual works or authors. Now the book takes up the particularities of Romanticism in process. First it examines the impact of the political and discursive crisis of the Revolution debate and Napoleonic global war, especially the radically destabilising effects of those events on ideas of language and literary form, and their ability to embody and disseminate meaning and value.
The book then turns to what emerges prominently from this crisis in the discursive order--the construction, from the 1790s to the early 1820s, of a "national" identity, history, culture, and (imperial) destiny in the face of prolonged external threat and internal regional and social division and conflict. Finally, this central section of the book describes the role of literature, as reformulated in Romanticism, in enabling the formation of the modern liberal state, from the 1810s and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic aftermath, through major correspondences with Continental European Romantic liberalism, to the early 1830s and the coinciding emergence of the modern Romantic canon, the institution of a national literature, and the reconstruction of the franchised political nation to be more or less congruent with the (adult male) reading public. The book closes with an account of the various (and contradictory) Romanticisms constructed for the needs of the liberal states which Romanticism did much to enable in the first place The following, then, is a chapter outline of the book.
Each chapter opens with general remarks on issues, contexts, and developments, and then proceeds to consider genres, sub-genres, and clusters of discourses in relation to individual authors, texts, and coteries, schools, factions, or groups, as seems appropriate for the particular chapter. Each chapter will be about 20,000 words in length. 1. Romanticism: Definitions, Issues, Conditions, and Contexts: (a) Definitions, Issues, and Questions: the idea (and problematics) of literary periods: history of "romantic," "romanticism," and related terms in literary history and criticism: relation of the cultural and the political (was Romanticism a displacement of the political into the aesthetic?): Romanticism in relation to other movements in its time (Utilitarianism, Evangelicalism: reform: liberalism): the persistence of the obsolete (co-existence of Romanticism with "residual" literary movements): Romanticism and modernisation: Romanticism in the late twentieth century.
(b) Romantic Texts, Books, Readers, and Writers: the material culture of books and texts: "text" and "work": the book trade of the time: copyright, authorship, and entrepreneurship: the market for books: the "rise of the reading public" (or reading publics): production and distribution of books: kinds of books-as-material-objects: rise of the reprints leading to national canons: the importance of the commercial circulating libraries: magazine culture, from amateurism to professional authorship: producers and consumers, writers and readers, expression and interpretation: the rise of the modern author: Romanticism--an ideology of the author as sovereign subject? of the reading public as subjects in silent correspondence? the discursive order and print culture from Enlightenment to Reform Bill: hierarchies of genres, gendering of genres, inversion of the historic generic order(c) Questions of Language: standardisation of the "national" language and the marginalisation of dialects and sociolects: professionalisation of public language and its effect on the ability of subaltern groups to have a public voice: representation of speech in writing(d) Sources, Resources, and Revisions: the Enlightenments and Sensibility: the Enlightenments' interest in culture, modernisation, history, materialist epistemology, and human self-transformation taken up by Romanticism, revised in crisis: the culture of Sensibility: body and mind, socialisation and acculturation of the individual, move from ascribed (social) to inherent (subjective) identity, poetics and politics of expressivity: the revolutionised and revolutionary consciousness: coterie culture and revolutionary vanguards: education and reform: writers for children: beyond Enlightenment and Sensibility: plebeian print and customary culture, piety and provincialism2.
Revolution and the Crisis of Discourse. Revolution and the opening of the discursive order: Burke, Paine, Mackintosh: the Della Cruscans (with Charlotte Smith): from Sentimental to Revolutionary poetics: representing Revolution: Helen Maria Williams, Dr John Moore, and political tourism: dramatising reform and revolution: Holcroft, Cowley, and Inchbald: constructing readings publics: the "analytical" reviews and professional intellectual culture: the "new philosophy": Godwin and Holcroft: Revolutionary feminism: Wollstonecraft and Hays: the English Jacobin novel and the Anti-Jacobin novel (Holcroft, Inchbald, Robinson, Smith, Bage, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Lamb, Hamilton and other burlesque writers): contra-verse: Barlow, Robinson, Williams, Thelwall, Southey, Mathias, Anti-Jacobin burlesque: popular and pseudo-popular politics: Spence, Eaton, Lee, and Hannah More3. The Revolutionary Aftermath and Romantic Nationalism.
Dramatic conciliations: Baillie and neo-sentimental drama: counter-revolutionary feminism: Hannah More: social sympathy and personal restoration: Wordsworth and Coleridge from 1798 to 1814: writing Britain and the United Kingdom: Edgeworth, Hamilton, and Owenson: "national" history and biographical romance: the Porter sisters: reformed subjects: writers for children, mainly women: fantasies of the plebs: Legh Richmond, the Religious Tract Society, literature of social surveillance and control: the great patriotic poetic war: Campbell, Hemans: the professionalisation of magazine culture: the Edinburgh Magazine, Quarterly Review, and others: patriotic classics: the "British Dramatists, Novelists," etc.: the persistence of English Jacobinism and the emergence of literary liberalism: satires on the establishment, Byron and P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Godwin (still): novel subjects: Austen anticipates the modern state4. Romanticism, Reform, and the Modern State.
Opening section: the Continental European context of restoration, reaction, and revolt, with its literature, and British sympathy with yet self-distinction from Continental politics and literary Romanticism: national historiography and historical fiction, drama, and verse narrative: Scott, Byron, Moore, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Hemans: magazines of imagined communities (and sub-communities): the London Magazine, Westminster, Fraser's, the "ladies'" magazines, the "mechanics'" magazines, religious magazines: Romantic subjectivities: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Landon, Disraeli: the embourgeoisement of town and coun