19th-century Literature and Romanticism

An account of Coleridge's life and career which aims to be both comprehensive and searching, relying on the most up to date available information. Although arranged in roughly chronological fashion it focuses on themes and ideas, tracing the development of his varying interests and obsessions, notably in the field of psychology. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between Coleridge and James Mackintosh, his relationship with Sara Hutchinson, arguments about the reality or otherwise of his unacknowledged borrowings from other writers, the originality of his comments on Shakespeare, the course of his early interest in zoomagnetism—resumed when German thinkers abandon their initial scepticism—and the development and nature of his religious beliefs.

This book begins with two fatal duels, as the best introduction to a literary period best defined by its antagonisms – between England and Scotland, Whigs and Tories, men and women, and between poets and their critics. It covers the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and focuses on the three publishing phenomena of the age: the novels of Walter Scott, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It attempts a radical reconfiguration of our understanding of literary culture in the years after Waterloo.

Many scholars have written about 18th-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction — novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in 18th-century provincial England. This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in 18th-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices — and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, men in the provinces were the principal customers for 18th-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women — women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. These and other findings will alter the way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.

THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.

This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the 19th century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of 19th-century literature's relationship with science. In particular, it brings the physical sciences more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has previously been the case. Writers discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some well-known in the history of science (including Faraday, Herschel, and Whewell), and a raft of lesser-known figures. Alice Jenkins draws a new map of the interactions between literature and science in the first half of the 19th century, showing how both disciplines were wrestling with the same central political and intellectual concerns — regulating access to knowledge, organising knowledge productively, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledge. Space has become a subject of enormous critical interest in literary and cultural studies. This book gives a wide-ranging account of how early nineteenth-century writers thought about — and thought with — space. Burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Writers in all genres and disciplines, from across the political spectrum, returned repeatedly to ideas and images of space when they needed to set up or dismantle boundaries in the intellectual realm, and when they wanted to talk about what kinds of knowledge certain groups of readers wanted, needed, or deserved.