Central to any reappraisal of Southey’s mid to late career, is 'Roderick'. This best-selling epic romance has not been republished since 1838 and is contextualised here within Southey’s wider oeuvre. The four-volume edition also benefits from a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, endnotes and a consolidated index.
Central to any reappraisal of Southey’s mid to late career, is 'Roderick'. This best-selling epic romance has not been republished since 1838 and is contextualised here within Southey’s wider oeuvre. The four-volume edition also benefits from a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, endnotes and a consolidated index.
Central to any reappraisal of Southey’s mid to late career, is 'Roderick'. This best-selling epic romance has not been republished since 1838 and is contextualised here within Southey’s wider oeuvre. The four-volume edition also benefits from a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, endnotes and a consolidated index.
Central to any reappraisal of Southey’s mid to late career, is 'Roderick'. This best-selling epic romance has not been republished since 1838 and is contextualised here within Southey’s wider oeuvre. The four-volume edition also benefits from a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, endnotes and a consolidated index.
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History Volume 17 (CMR 17) is about relations between the two faiths in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia from 1800 to 1914. It gives descriptions, assessments and bibliographical details of all known works from this period.
This study sheds light on a major and until now little studied Liverpool writer, Edward Rushton (1782-1814), whose politics and poetics were imbued in the most pressing events and debates shaking the world during the Age of Revolution.
How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture. From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. Daniel E. White shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period. Investigating global metaphors of circulation and mobility, communication and exchange, commerce and conquest, he follows the movements of people, ideas, books, art, and artifacts initiated by writers, publishers, educators, missionaries, travelers, and reformers. Along the way, he places luminaries like Romantic poet Robert Southey and Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy in dialogue with a fascinating array of lesser-known figures, from the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the radical English journalist James Silk Buckingham to the mixed-race prodigy Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. In concert and in conflict, these cultural emissaries and activists articulated national and cosmopolitan perspectives that were more than reactions on the part of marginal groups to the metropolitan center of power and culture. The British Empire in India involved recursive transactions between the global East and West, channeling cultural, political, and religious formations that were simultaneously distinct and shared, local, national, and transnational.
Historians and literary scholars tend to agree that British intellectual culture underwent a fundamental transformation between 1770 and 1845. Yet they are unusually divided about the nature of that transformation and whether it is best understood as an epistemic rupture from, or a continuous dialogue with, the long eighteenth century. Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 rethinks the ways in which we understand the historical writing and the historical consciousness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that British historicism developed largely in quasi and para-historical genres such as memoir, biography, verse, fiction, and painting, rather than in works of 'real' history. In a number of inter-related essays on changing generic forms, styles, methods, and standards, the collection demonstrates that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary 'Romanticism' not only intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing, but that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis-a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling and imagination in historical writing-that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. In exploring this theme, the volume also seeks to consider wider questions about the philosophy of history and literature, including questions of truth, evidence, professionalization, disciplinary strategies, and methodology. At its heart is the idea that literary texts and other artistic representations of history can have historical value, and should therefore be taken seriously by practitioners of history in all its forms.
Focused on the Lake Poets’ prose writing—including their journalism and correspondence—this collection of essays challenges some widely held assumptions. Much of the narrative is Bristol-based, as the city’s reference library holds not only much of Southey’s personal library, but the borrowing registers of the old subscription library which still record the titles that Coleridge and Southey borrowed in the 1790s. It places the poets’ American Susquehanna project, customarily dismissed as the idealistic dreams of Oxbridge students, in the context of European emigration schemes prompted by the American Revolution. Similarly the label “Jacobin,” suggesting French revolutionary brutality, is shown here to be no more apt a description than “Communist” was in 1950s America. However, the book does show that the poets did challenge the government’s social and political assumptions of the day, often from a religious standpoint. The claim that the three poets abandoned democratic impulses when Napoleon invaded Switzerland is also here rebutted by their involvement—a decade later—in defending the independence of Spain and Portugal, not only against Bonaparte, but against their ancien-régime monarchies. When, in 1815, those monarchs were restored, Southey pinned his democratic hopes on the Portuguese colony of Brazil. At home, amid distress caused by wholesale demobilization and shrinkage of economically viable agricultural land, the poets understandably condemned the rabble-rousers and (correctly) predicted an assassination attempt. Coleridge and Southey, both youthful Unitarians and (like Wordsworth) devotees of the “religion of nature,” are argued here to have defended the Established Church against Catholic Emancipation, while the two brothers-in-law’s interest in Islam is shown to be more than mere obsessive Orientalism.
