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Key Concepts in Romantic Literature
\"This book provides a succinct yet wide-ranging critical overview of key concepts and texts in Romanticism that surveys the major genres and offers a comprehensive account of Romantic criticism and theory. It is aimed at both the undergraduate student and more experienced readers who seek a compact yet comprehensive up-to-date account of the poetry, drama and novels that characterized the Romantic period\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Virtuous Citizens
Demonstrates how contemporary manifestations of civic
publics trace directly to the early days of
nationhood The rise of the bourgeois public sphere
and the contemporaneous appearance of counterpublics in the
eighteenth century deeply influenced not only how politicians and
philosophers understood the relationships among citizens,
disenfranchised subjects, and the state but also how members of
the polity understood themselves. In
Virtuous Citizens :
Counterpublics and Sociopolitical Agency in Transatlantic
Literature , Kendall McClellan uncovers a fundamental and
still redolent transformation in conceptions of civic identity
that occurred over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Literature of this period exposes an emotional
investment in questions of civic selfhood born out of concern for
national stability and power, which were considered products of
both economic strength and a nation’s moral fiber.
McClellan shows how these debates traversed the Atlantic to
become a prominent component of early American literature,
evident in works by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among
others. Underlying popular opinion about who could participate in
the political public, McClellan argues, was an impassioned
rhetorical wrestling match over the right and wrong ways to
demonstrate civic virtue. Relying on long-established tropes of
republican virtue that lauded self-sacrifice and disregard for
personal safety, abolitionist writers represented loyalty to an
ideals-based community as the surest safeguard of both private
and public virtue. This evolution in civic virtue sanctioned acts
of protest against the state, offered disenfranchised citizens a
role in politics, and helped usher in the modern transnational
public sphere.
Virtuous Citizens shows that the modern public sphere
has always constituted a vital and powerful space for those
invested in addressing injustice and expanding democracy. To
illuminate some of the fundamental issues underlying
today’s sociopolitical unrest, McClellan traces the
transatlantic origins of questions still central to the
representation of movements like Black Lives Matter, the
Women’s March, and the Alt-Right: What is the primary
loyalty of a virtuous citizen? Are patriots those who defend the
current government against attacks, external and internal, or
those who challenge the government to fulfill sociopolitical
ideals?
eBook
The Cambridge history of Victorian literature
This collaborative history aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the 21st century.
Book
British Romanticism and the critique of political reason
Romantic writers responded to the challenges of reform and revolution by rethinking the scope of political reason.
What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution.
Timothy Michael argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France—and radicalism and repression in Britain—occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims.
This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period's politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.
eBook
Posting it : the Victorian revolution in letter writing
Until Queen Victoria instituted the Postal Reform Act of 1839, mail was a luxury affordable only by the rich. Golden demonstrates how cheap postage--which was quickly adopted in other countries--led to a postal \"network\" that can be viewed as a forerunner of computer-mediated communications. Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail--problems that remain with us today. --from publisher description
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Reform acts : Chartism, social agency, and the Victorian novel, 1832-1867
How Victorian novels imagined the idea of social agency.
Reform Acts offers a new approach to prominent questions raised in recent studies of the novel. By examining social agency from a historical rather than theoretical perspective, Chris R. Vanden Bossche investigates how particular assumptions involving agency came into being. Through readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian literature, he demonstrates that the Victorian tension between reform and revolution framed conceptions of agency in ways that persist in our own time.
Vanden Bossche argues that Victorian novels sought to imagine new forms of social agency evolving from Chartism, the dominant working-class movement of the time. Novelists envisioned alternative forms of social agency by employing contemporary discourses from Chartism's focus on suffrage as well as the means through which it sought to obtain it, such as moral versus physical force, land reform, and the cooperative movement.
Each of the three parts of Reform Acts begins with a chapter that analyzes contemporary conversations and debates about social agency in the press and in political debate. Succeeding chapters examine how novels envision ways of effecting social change, for example, class alliance in Barnaby Rudge; landed estates as well as finely graded hierarchy and politicians in Coningsby and Sybil; and reforming trade unionism in Mary Barton and North and South. By including novels written from a range of political perspectives, Vanden Bossche discovers patterns in Victorian thinking that are easily recognized in today's assumptions about social hierarchy.
eBook
The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals
Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures of pre-professionalism provided to Oxbridge undergraduates; of oath-taking in a wide range of professional creation and promotion ceremonies; of the education, promotion, and public practice of Victorian barristers; and of Victorian Parliamentary elections. A final chapter considers the consequences of rituals that fail through the lens of the Eglinton tournament. The uneasy place of Victorian writers, who were both promoters of and competitors with more established professionals, is considered throughout. Pionke's book excavates Victorian professionals' vital ritual culture, at the same time that its engagement with literary representations of the professions reconstructs writers' unique place in the zero-sum contest for professional status.
eBook
Jane Austen and philosophy
Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen's timeless tales of eighteenth-century English life. Even casual readers comprehend that these classic novels are not just love stories. They offer keen insights into various aspects of the human condition, such as interpersonal relationships, social conventions, and morality. Jane Austen and Philosophy offers all fans of Austen's work an introduction to the incredible depth of this English novelist's stories by probing, for example, the struggles of Elizabeth and Jane Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, and Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as they face societal pressures and their own desires. As the second book in the new Great Authors and Philosophy series,Jane Austen and Philosophy explores questions about morality and duty, propriety and dignity, and obligation and happiness that sheds new light on the works of this classic author and reveals deep issues still relevant to the men and women of society today.
Contributions by Charles Bane, Vittorio Bufacchi, Nancy Marck Cantwell, Eva Dadlez, Kathleen Dougherty, Keith Dromm, Suzie Gibson, Richard Gilmore, A.G. Holdier, Christopher Ketcham, David LaRocca, William Lindenmuth, Rita Oliveira, Elizabeth Olson, Janelle Pötzsch, Amanda Riter, Charles Taliaferro, Sally Winkle, and Andrea Zanin
eBook