A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age

A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age provides new perspectives on the relationships between literature and culture in Britain from 1780 to 1830

• Provides original essays from a variety of multi-disciplinary scholars on the Romantic era
  
• Includes fresh insights into such topics as religious controversy and politics, empire and nationalism, and the relationship of Romanticism to modernist aesthetics
  
• Ranges across the Romantic era's literary, visual, and non-fictional genres

List of Illustrations vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
Jon Klancher

1 Transfiguring God: Religion, Revolution, Romanticism 14
Robert M. Maniquis

2 Romanticism and Empire 36
Saree Makdisi

3 “Associations Respect[ing] the Past”: Enlightenment and Romantic Historicism 57
Anthony Jarrells

4 Nationalisms in Romantic Britain and Ireland: Culture, Politics, and the Global 77
Miranda Burgess

5 “With an Industry Incredible”: Politics, Writing, and the Public Sphere 99
Paul Keen

6 Romantic Justice: Law, Literature, and Individuality 119
Mark Schoenfield

7 Natural History in the Romantic Period 141
Noah Heringman

8 Romantic Sciences: British and Continental Thresholds 168
Frederick Burwick

9 Consumer Culture: Getting and Spending in the Romantic Age 189
Nicholas Mason

10 The Romantic-Era Book Trade 212
Lee Erickson

11 Visual Pleasures, Visionary States: Art, Entertainment, and the Nation 232
Gillen D’Arcy Wood

12 What’s at Stake? Kantian Aesthetics, Romantic and Modern Poetics, Sociopolitical Commitment 257
Robert Kaufman

Index 283

"Though unusually well (and often quotably) written for collections of this type, the volume is best suited to specialists, who will find plenty of usable nuggets here." (CHOICE, 2009)

Jon Klancher teaches Romantic and Victorian literature, the sociology of culture, and the history of books and reading at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written widely on Romantic and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural history in such journals and collections as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, MLQ, Romantic Metropolis, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The New Historicism, and The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1837. Author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (1987), he is currently completing a book, Transfiguring “Arts & Sciences”: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age explores the diverse issues and debates of the Romantic era, treating it both aesthetically and as a transformational historical epoch that ushered in Britain's modern industrialized society.

In a series of original, multi-disciplinary essays from scholarly experts, the text explores the full range of the Romantic period's literary, visual, and non-fictional genres — from poetry, drama, and the novel, to periodical writing, literary criticism, painting and panoramas. These richly-varied, innovative contributions provide fresh new critical insights into the era's religious controversy and politics, natural history and the "second scientific revolution", empire and nationalism, the relationship between Romanticism to modernist aesthetics, and more. Compelling and scholarly, A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age enhances our understanding of the Romantics' imaginative and emotional responses to the conflicting forces of change that swept through Britain during this brief but crucially important literary and cultural era.