The period 1792-94 witnessed the emergence of the first genuinely popular radical movement in Britain. After the phenomenal success of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man", the government moved swiftly to prevent French republican ideas taking hold in Britain, beginning with the prosecution of Paine himself in absentia. This book focuses on this period.
The period 1792-94 witnessed the emergence of the first genuinely popular radical movement in Britain. After the phenomenal success of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man", the government moved swiftly to prevent French republican ideas taking hold in Britain, beginning with the prosecution of Paine himself in absentia. This book focuses on this period.
The period 1792-94 witnessed the emergence of the first genuinely popular radical movement in Britain. After the phenomenal success of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man", the government moved swiftly to prevent French republican ideas taking hold in Britain, beginning with the prosecution of Paine himself in absentia. This book focuses on this period.
The period 1792–94 witnessed the emergence of the first genuinely popular radical movement in Britain. This collection contains the key trials of London radicalism from 1792–94. It includes a general introduction, but each of the trials is introduced in its own right and supported by endnotes and further reading.
John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why was Milton so important to the Romantics? How did 'Milton the Regicide', a man often regarded in his lifetime as a dangerous traitor and heretic, become 'the Sublime Milton'? The late eighteenth century saw a sudden and to date almost undocumented craze for all things Miltonic, the symptoms of which included the violation of his grave and the sale of his hair and bones as relics, the republication of all his works including his political tracts in unprecedented numbers, the appearance of the poet in the works, letters, dreams and visions of all the major British Romantic poets and even frequent reports of hauntings by his ghost. Drawing on the traditions of cultural, intellectual and bibliographic history as well as recent trends in literary scholarship on the romantic period, Joseph Crawford explores the dramatic shift in Milton's cultural status after 1790. He builds on a now significant literature on Milton's legacy to the Romantic poets, uncovering the cultural historical background against which the Romantics and their contemporaries encountered and interacted with Milton's reputation and works.
This book argues for the importance of blasphemy in shaping the literature and readership of Percy Bysshe Shelley and of the Romantic period more broadly. Not only are perceptions of blasphemy taken to be inextricable from politics, this book also argues for blasphemous ‘irreverence’ as both inspiring and necessitating new poetic creativity. The book reveals the intersection of blasphemy, censorship and literary property throughout the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, attesting to the effect of this connection on Shelley’s poetry more specifically. Paul Whickman notes how Shelley’s perceived blasphemy determined the nature and readership of his published works through censorship and literary piracy. Simultaneously, Whickman crucially shows that aesthetics, content and the printed form of the physical text are interconnected and that Shelley’s political and philosophical views manifest themselves in his writing both formally and thematically.
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.
Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848 offers a range of case studies which consider individual artists' personal, professional and artistic relationships with the Royal Academy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing together the research of leading historians of British artistic culture during this period. Over its introduction and nine essays, this collection considers the Academy as a lived organism whose most effective role, following its establishment in 1768, was as a reference point towards, around and against which artists operated in their relationships with each other and with artistic practice itself. In so doing, this collection also considers the relationship between Academic ideals and individual practice (as well as lived experience) during this period of art?s increasingly public manifestation at the Academy. Individual artists examined include Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby, Benjamin West and William Etty. Thinking beyond the dichotomy of loyalism and rebellion - and complicating notions of the Academy as a monolithic ossifying institution from which progressive artists would be ?liberated? in the wake of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?s emergence in 1848 - this volume investigates the Academy?s varied impact upon the lives, experiences and ideals of its diverse artistic communities.
