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  3. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism is a series of original critical studies devoted to literature in English from the early 1780s to the early 1830s, written against the background of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. Books in the series have an interdisciplinary bias, examining for example the relations between literature and politics, science, philosophy or religion; or looking at gender relations, notions of literature, and literary history, as revealed in Romantic writing and the critical and theoretical traditions which the literature of this period has helped to shape.

  • Founding Editors: Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
  • General Editors: James Chandler, University of Chicago
  • Editorial Boards: Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow, Paul Hamilton, University of London, Claire Connolly, University College Cork, Claudia Johnson, Princeton University, New Jersey, Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara, Jerome McGann, University of Virginia, David Simpson, University of California, Davis, Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame, Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

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114 results in Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

Page 1 of 6

Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period
  • Grand Tours
  • Edited by James Watt
  • Alison O'Byrne
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
  • Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas – artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific – and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.

British Romanticism and the Matter of Voice
  • Alice Rhodes
  • Published online:
    16 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Physiological, political, and poetic studies of the relationship between the human body and voice saw increased attention and took on new significance in British literature of the politically turbulent period between the 1770s and the 1820s. Focusing on Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, three writers whose works draw together the fields of science, politics, language, and literature, and who were subject to charges of political radicalism and materialist philosophy, Alice Rhodes draws attention to a developing theory of spoken and poetic utterance which, for its subscribers, suggested a fundamental, material, and reciprocal connection between the speaking body and the physical, social, and political worlds around it. By investigating the Romantic-era fascination with the mechanics and physiology of speech production, she explores how Darwin, Thelwall, and Shelley came to present the voice as a form of physical, autonomous, and effective political action.

Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons
  • Romanticism's Black Geographies
  • Katey Castellano
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • Building on scholarship in Romanticism, Black studies, and environmental humanities, this book follows the political thought of Robert Wedderburn, a Black Romantic-era writer. Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn's vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Instead of emancipation administered by British colonial and commercial interests, Wedderburn championed the ecological projects of enslaved and Maroon communities in the Caribbean as models for liberation. His stories of Black, place-based opposition to slavery provide an innovative lens for rereading significant aspects of the Romantic period, including the abolition of slavery, landscape aesthetics, and nineteenth-century radical politics.

Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing
  • Alan Vardy
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Walking and its relationship to our mental and cultural lives has been a topic of huge academic and popular interest in the last few years. Here, Alan Vardy explores the role of walking in one of its most obvious locations within English literature: Romanticism. Through chapters focusing on both canonical and non-canonical writings – including rich ephemera – by Joseph Cottle, Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, de Quincey and John Clare, Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing draws out a specific focus on affect studies and the relationship between walking and trauma, examining the relationship between emotional states and movement through space and time. It also takes up the work of lesser-known Romantic writers such as Elizabeth Smith and Thomas Wilkinson in order to mount a broad and deep exploration of the quotidian, fleeting events that nonetheless constitute our subjective selves.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
  • The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity
  • Catherine Packham
  • Published online:
    15 February 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • Why was Wollstonecraft's landmark feminist work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, categorised as a work of political economy when it was first published? Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft's major writings - including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, and her travel writing - this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire
  • Matthew Leporati
  • Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • The British Romantic period saw an unprecedented explosion in epic poems, an understudied literary phenomenon that enabled writers to address unique historical tensions of the era. Long associated with empire, epic revived at a time when Britain was expanding its imperial reach, and when the concept of imperialism itself began to evolve into the notion of a benevolent project of spreading British culture and religion across the globe. Matthew Leporati argues that the epic revival not only reflects but also interrogates this evangelical turn. The first to examine the impact of the missionary work on epic literature, this book offers sustained analysis of both under-read and canonical works, bringing fresh historical and literary contexts to bear on our understanding of this unique revival of epic poetry. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel
  • Olivia Ferguson
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • What was caricature to novelists in the Romantic period? Why does Jane Austen call Mr Dashwood's wife 'a strong caricature of himself'? Why does Mary Shelley describe the body of Frankenstein's creature as 'in proportion', but then 'distorted in its proportions' – and does caricature have anything to do with it? This book answers those questions, shifting our understanding of 'caricature' as a literary-critical term in the decades when 'the English novel' was first defined and canonised as a distinct literary entity. Novels incorporated caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric to tell readers what different realisms purported to show them. Recovering the period's concept of caricature, Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel sheds light on formal realism's self-reflexivity about the 'caricature' of artifice, exaggeration and imagination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Sound and Sense in British Romanticism
  • Edited by James Grande, Carmel Raz
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • A radical re-imagining of the relationship between sound and sense took place in Britain in the decades around 1800. This new approach reconfigured sound as central to understandings of space and temporality, from the diurnal rhythms of everyday life in the modern city to the 'deep time' of the natural world. At the same time, sound emerged as a frequently disruptive phenomenon, a philosophical and political problem, and a force with the power to overwhelm listeners. This is the first book devoted to the topic and brings together scholars from literary studies, musicology, history and philosophy through the interdisciplinary frameworks of sound studies and the history of the senses. The chapters pursue a wide range of subjects, from 'national airs' to the London stage, and from experiments in sound to new musical and scientific instruments. Collectively, they demonstrate how a focus on sound can enrich our understanding of Romantic-era culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Staël, Romanticism and Revolution
  • The Life and Times of the First European
  • John Claiborne Isbell
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • Two centuries of sexism have hidden Staël's place in international history. Straddling the divides of the French Revolution, Napoleonic Europe, emergent nationalism, and European Romanticism, and playing pivotal roles in those movements, she was also a friend of Byron, Jefferson, and Tsar Alexander. Extensive archival research, and a complete contextual overview of Staël's writings, here restore Staël's canonical status as political philosopher, historian, European Romantic theorist, and Revolutionary. While the term stateswoman is not commonly used, it describes Staël aptly, acting as she necessarily did through men around her. The brilliant game of masks and proxies imposed on her by patriarchy is detailed here, alongside her unending fight for the oppressed, from the nations of Napoleon's subjugated Europe to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Wordsworth After War
  • Recovering Peace in the Later Poetry
  • Philip Shaw
  • Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023
  • William Wordsworth's later poetry complicates possibilities of life and art in war's aftermath. This illuminating study provides new perspectives and reveals how his work following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars reflects a passionate, lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace. Focusing on works from between 1814 and 1822, Philip Shaw constructs a unique and compelling account of how Wordsworth, in both his ongoing poetic output and in his revisions to earlier works, sought to modify, refute, and sometimes sustain his early engagement with these issues as both an artist and a political thinker. In an engaging style, Shaw reorients our understanding of the later writings of a major British poet and the post-war literary culture in which his reputation was forged. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry
  • Dialogues with the Dead
  • Tim Fulford
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly-revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth's poetry, with such broadly-felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth's old age in relation to his earlier work.

Byron's Don Juan
  • The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century
  • Richard Cronin
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.

Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era
  • Hannah Doherty Hudson
  • Published online:
    04 May 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing
  • Neil Ramsey
  • Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • Military literature was one of the most prevalent forms of writing to appear during the Romantic era, yet its genesis in this period is often overlooked. Ranging from histories to military policy, manuals, and a new kind of imaginative war literature in military memoirs and novels, modern war writing became a highly influential body of professional writing. Drawing on recent research into the entanglements of Romanticism with its wartime trauma and revisiting Michel Foucault's ground-breaking work on military discipline and the biopolitics of modern war, this book argues that military literature was deeply reliant upon Romantic cultural and literary thought and the era's preoccupations with the body, life, and writing. Simultaneously, it shows how military literature runs parallel to other strands of Romantic writing, forming a sombre shadow against which Romanticism took shape and offering its own exhortations for how to manage the life and vitality of the nation.

Late Romanticism and the End of Politics
  • Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men
  • John Havard
  • Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • In the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again.

Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity
  • Jamison Kantor
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    19 January 2023
  • Despite our preconceptions, Romantic writers, artists, and philosophers did not think of honor as an archaic or regressive concept, but as a contemporary, even progressive value that operated as a counterpoint to freedom, a well-known preoccupation of the period's literature. Focusing on texts by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole, this book argues that the revitalization of honor in the first half of the nineteenth century signalled a crisis in the emerging liberal order, one with which we still wrestle today: how can political subjects demand real, materialist forms of dignity in a system dedicated to an abstract, and often impoverished, idea of 'liberty'? Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity presents both a theory and a history of this question in the media of the Black Atlantic, the Jacobin novel, the landscape poem, and the “financial” romance.

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom
  • Walking with Euclid
  • Ann C. Colley
  • Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    16 March 2023
  • When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed to its principles, he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed, his geometric training would often structure his observations on religion, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For Coleridge, however, this perspective never competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but, rather, intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry, Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing.

Romanticism, Republicanism, and the Swiss Myth
  • Patrick Vincent
  • Published online:
    08 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • The first detailed treatment of Switzerland in British literature and culture from Joseph Addison to John Ruskin, this book analyzes the aesthetic and political uses of what is commonly called the 'Swiss myth' in the parallel development of Romanticism and liberalism. The myth merged the country's legends going back to the Middle Ages with the Enlightenment image of a happy, free nation of alpine shepherds. Its unique combination of conservative, progressive, and radical associations enabled writers before the French Revolution to call for democratic reforms, whereas those coming after could refigure it as a conservative alternative to French liberté. Integrating intellectual history with literary studies, and addressing a wide range of Romantic-period texts and authors, among them Byron, the Shelleys, Hemans, Scott, Coleridge, and, above all, Wordsworth, the book argues that the myth contributed to the liberal idea of the people as a sublime yet sleeping sovereign.

Jane Austen and Other Minds
  • Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction
  • Eric Reid Lindstrom
  • Published online:
    04 November 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

Orientation in European Romanticism
  • The Art of Falling Upwards
  • Paul Hamilton
  • Published online:
    13 October 2022
    Print publication:
    20 October 2022
  • Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

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