Key Concepts in Romantic Literature

An indispensable introduction to the texts, contexts, and criticisms of British Romanticism. Moore and Strachan have done an exemplary job of demonstrating just why Romanticism has exerted such a powerful influence over English verse and literary criticism for over two hundred years - why Romanticism has been and remains, as M. H. Abrams famously put it, 'one of those terms historians can neither do with nor make do without'. They have thought long and deeply about the subject before them and have here assembled a compelling and beautifully-written overview of a notoriously evasive concept, taking into account both canonical and variant forms of Romanticism, with entries not only on such expected topics as, say, revolutionary politics, the Romantic imagination, and the periodical press, but also on Romantic sexualities, the slave trade, and labouring-class poets. Moreover, they have done so with a precision and an elan that will appeal alike to both postgraduate and undergraduate readers. Key Concepts in Romantic Literature surpasses every other introduction to Romanticism available on the market today. - Professor Charles Mahoney, University of Connecticut, US. With its carefully selected bibliographic references and abundant quotations from primary and secondary sources, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature offers some of the best evidence around that Romantic studies are an exciting territory that constantly promises new discoveries and has not yet finished surprising us. This book represents an extremely welcome new work of reference on Romanticism. In recent decades, the field of Romantic studies has changed beyond recognition, and this book is without doubt the best and handiest guide to navigate our way through it. Students and scholars alike will be grateful to the authors. Moore and Strachan have given us a lively, stimulating and accessible guide, offering their readers an entire cultural phase in all its contradictory variety. What we get here is not just Romanticism as a few aesthetic principles embedded in a few poems. Instead, we get a Romantic age made up of churches and brothels, genteel travellers and daring explorers, politicians and agitators, fashionable women and embattled reviewers, dramatists and novelists, factories and rural vistas, dandies and boxers, atheists and evangelicals. We have here, in manageable form, the whole intricate fabric of an era that gave birth to some of the most exciting literature in the English language tradition and that still looms large over the contemporary imagination. - Professor Diego Saglia, University of Parma, Italy.

Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832).Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing.

The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British and Irish literature, history and culture.