John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.
In Romantic Marks and Measures, Julia S. Carlson examines Wordsworth's poetry of "speech" and "nature" as a poetry of print, written and read in the midst of topographic and typographic experimentation and change.
This volume offers a reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Updated, revised, and with new manuscript material, this expanded new edition responds to the most significant critical work on Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers in the three decades since the book first appeared. Fresh material is drawn from newspapers and printed sources; the poetry of 1798 is given more detailed attention, and the critical debate surrounding new historicism is freshly appraised. A new introduction reflects on how the book was originally researched, offers new insights into the notorious Léonard Bourdon killings of 1793, and revisits John Thelwall's predicament in 1798. University politics, radical dissent, and first-hand experiences of Revolutionary France form the substance of the opening chapters. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are tracked in detail, and both poets are shown to have been closely connected with the London Corresponding Society. Godwin's diaries, now accessible in electronic form, have been drawn upon extensively to supplement the narrative of his intellectual influence. Offering a comparative perspective on the poets and their contemporaries, the book investigates the ways in which 1790s radicals coped with personal crisis, arrests, trumped-up charges, and prosecutions. Some fled the country, becoming refugees; others went underground, hiding away as inner émigrés. Against that backdrop, Wordsworth and Coleridge opted for a different revolution: they wrote poems that would change the way people thought.
Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.
This groundbreaking new volume unites eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, showcasing how these fields can vibrantly benefit one another. In eleven chapters that engage a variety of eighteenth-century texts, contributors explore timely themes and topics such as climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, indigeneity and decoloniality, and green utopianism. Additionally, each chapter reflects on pedagogical concerns, asking: How do we teach eighteenth-century environmental humanities? With particular attention to the voices of early-career scholars who bring cutting-edge perspectives, these essays highlight vital and innovative trends that can enrich both disciplines, making them essential for classroom use.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary lecture arrived on London's cultural scene as an influential critical medium and popular social event. It flourished for two decades in the hands of the period's most prominent lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors' reading habits, burnish their own professional profiles, and establish a literary canon. Auditors wielded their own considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a lecturer's success, and independent series could collapse midway if attendance waned. Two chapters are therefore devoted to the auditors, whose creative responses to what they heard often constituted cultural works in their own right. Auditors wrote poems and letters about lecture performances, acted as patrons to lecturers, and hosted dinners and conversation parties that followed these events. Prominent auditors included John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury. The Romantic public literary lecture is a fascinating cultural phenomenon in its own right, but understanding the medium has significant implications for some of the period's most important literary criticism, such as Coleridge's readings of Shakespeare and Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (1818). The book's two main aims are to chart the emergence of the literary lecture as a popular medium and to develop a critical approach to these events by drawing on an interdisciplinary discussion about how to treat historical speaking performances.
How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science? 2018 Winner, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, The International Conference on Romanticism Richard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known. Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others. Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.
In the nineteenth century the beauty of the night sky is the source of both imaginative wonder in poetry and political and commercial power through navigation. The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy examines the impact of astronomical discovery and imperial exploration on poets including Barbauld, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti.