Romance and Revolution
Shelley and the Politics of a Genre
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:1st Sep '94
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Paperback£37.99(9780521021104)
Relates the revival of literary romance to the French Revolution's imaginative impact on English Romanticism.
The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, David Duff traces this combination in its literary and political manifestations.The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. In this innovative study of the transformations of a genre, David Duff examines the paradox whereby the unstable visionary world of romance came to provide an apt language for the representation of revolution, and how the literary form was itself politicised in the period. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, he traces the ambivalent ideological overtones of the chivalric revival, the polemical appropriation of the language of romance in the 'pamphlet war' of the 1790s, and the emergence of a radical cult of chivalry among the Hunt-Shelley circle in 1815–17. Central to the book is a detailed analysis of Shelley's neglected revolutionary romances Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, flawed but fascinating poems in which the politics of romance is most fully displayed.
"...will be savoured by those who have an interest in the literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic." Notes and Queries
"...[a] thoroughly researched, lucidly written book..." C. Walker, Choice
"The best parts of David Duff's book are wonderfully informative and should make a real difference to the current round of debates about Romanticism as a historical and cultural formation." William Keach, Modern Philology
ISBN: 9780521450188
Dimensions: 237mm x 159mm x 23mm
Weight: 576g
300 pages