Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism

The early nineteenth century saw the dead take on new life in Scottish literature; sometimes quite literally. This book brings together a range of Scottish Romantic texts, identifying a shared interest an imagined national dead. It argues that the publications of Edinburgh-based publisher William Blackwood were the crucible for this new form of Scottish cultural nationalism. Scottish Romantic authors including James Hogg, John Wilson and John Galt, use the Romantic kirkyard to engage with, and often challenge, contemporary ideas of modernity. The book also explores the extensive ripples that this cultural moment generated across Scottish, British and wider Anglophone literary sphere over the next century.

Suggests that women’s writing was a crucial part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period

• Positions women’s writing as crucial to the history of sexuality in the long Romantic period
• Develops a new approach to the study of gender within Romanticism, by highlighting sexual transgression rather than obedience to cultural norms
• Develops bold new approaches to several now canonical authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, George Sand, and Emily Brontë
• Gives prominence to little known figures such as Mary Diana Dods and Elizabeth Moody
• Includes new work by emerging and leading scholars in the field

Women’s writing was a crucial part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period, yet has not often been seen as part of that history. This collection shows how women writers fit into a tradition of Romanticism that recognizes transgressive sexuality as a defining feature. Building on recent research on the period’s sexual culture, it shows how women writers were theorizing perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives. In doing so, the collection also challenges current understandings of ‘transgression’ as a sexual category.

Confronts the racial and ethnic logics of the Oriental subject undergirding the development of Romantic poetics

• Demonstrates how the construction of the modern lyric subject germinated during the Romantic period through the creation and invention of the “Oriental” subject
• It analyses works by Romantic-era authors, including William Jones, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, William Blake and Phillis Wheatley
• Uses the concepts of “orientations” and “Orient” to provide fresh readings of British Romantic poetry

What happens when we redirect our lines of reading along new lines, borders, and orientations—those that fail to fit neatly into the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West? What is, who stands for, and where exactly is the Orient" in British Romantic poetry? To where does the "Orient" lead? Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation responds by tracing shifting orientations—cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered— through Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings. Kim coins the term "poetics of orientation" to describe a poetics newly aware of cultural difference as a site of aesthetic contestation. She focuses on the contestation that occurs at the site of the lyric subject. A "poetics of orientation", rather than situating the lyric subject in assumed racial whiteness, repositions the lyric subject within discussions of Orientalism and racial formation, tracing the white supremacist logics that have for too long been dismissed as inessential or nonconsequential to Romantic studies.

Reconsiders the 1820s, an unjustly neglected, highly self-conscious decade defined by massive and anxiety-inducing cultural transformations.

• Innovative essays cover a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, including book history, periodical culture, media forms, music, theatre, visual art, and provincial and colonial writing
• Interweaves short keyword essays providing additional insights into major concerns of the decade as expressed in the language of the timeThe product of a collaborative research process bringing together senior scholars and early-career researchers

The 1820s has commonly been overlooked in literary and cultural studies, seen as a barren interregnum between the achievements of Romanticism and the Victorian era proper, or, at best, as a time of transition bridging two major periods of cultural production. This volume contends that the innovations, fears and experiments of the 1820s are both of considerable interest in themselves and vital for comprehending how Victorian and Romantic culture wrote and visioned one another into being. Remediating the 1820s explores the decade’s own sense of itself as a period of expansion in terms of the projection of British power and knowledge, but also its tremendous uncertainty about where this left traditional identities and moral values. In doing so, the collection articulates how specific novelties, transformations and anxieties of the time remediated and remade culture and society in manners that continue powerfully to resonate.

Traces a multifaceted discourse about Denmark in British eighteenth-century and Romantic-period culture

• Offers original perspectives on British, Danish, and European Romanticism, and the relationship between them
• Contributes to the scholarly discussion of Romantic nationalism and the emergence of the idea of ‘regional’ cultural identities in the early nineteenth century
• Addresses a wide range of Nordic as well as Anglophone scholarship
• Provides a select chronology of key historical events and points of cultural contact between Britain and Denmark in the long eighteenth century

British Romanticism and Denmark shows how the articulation in British Romantic-period writing of the idea of a ‘Northern’ cultural identity – shared by Britain and Denmark and rooted in the Classical Scandinavian past – played an important role in the emergence and development of Romanticism and Romantic nationalism in both countries. By addressing a wide range of Nordic as well as Anglophone scholarship, this study offers new perspectives on British, Danish and European Romanticisms, and on the relationship between them.

Redefines Mary Wollstonecraft as a multi-lingual cosmopolitan

• Defines Wollstonecraft as a cosmopolitan thinker
• Examines her engagement with European writers
• Analyses her translations as creative rewritings of their source texts

Considering her transformation of material from the works of European writers and orators such as Rousseau, Mirabeau, Felicité de Genlis, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Margareta de Cambon, as well as British sentimental philosophers and the radical theologian Richard Price, this book argues that Wollstonecraft espouses a cosmopolitan ethic that subordinates local and national allegiances to philanthropy, or love of humankind. At a time of international conflict, burgeoning capitalism and colonial enterprise, she represents philanthropy and cultural authenticity as the means to resist tyranny and imperialism in all their forms and light the way to global justice.

Brings Romanticism into dialogue with current understandings of consciousness

• Offers the first edited volume in five decades to tackle the problem of consciousness
• Features a mix of established and new voices in the field of Romanticism
• Brings the dialogue between the period and consciousness up to date in an approachable style

With explosive interest in Romantic science and theories of mind and a renewed sense of the period’s porousness to the world, along with new developments in cognitive theory and research, Romantic studies scholars have been called to revisit and re-map the terrain laid out in the highly influential 1970 volume Romanticism and Consciousness. Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited brings this shift in approach to Romantic “consciousness”—no longer the possession of a sole self but transactional, social, and entangled with the outside world—up to date.

In December 1840, Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she wished ‘with all [her] heart’ that she ‘had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine’. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed women’s reading and women’s writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Lady’s Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publication’s eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History illuminates the periodical’s achievements and influence, and reveals what this vital period of literary history looks like when we see it anew through the lens of one of its most long-lived and popular publications.

Rethinks the characterisation of romantic-era written history as primarily sentimental

• Rethinks the characterisation of romantic-era written history as primarily sentimental or feeling
• Brings together literary criticism, theories of the novel, and philosophies of history
• Reflects on the contribution of romantic-era historical writing to the making of the modern historical method

Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotion, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks both the paradigms of resurrection and revivification that have come to stand for romantic history and that history’s place within the development of modern history.

Uncovers alternative ways of seeing the environment from the Romantic period

• Explores how Romantic ideas of nature are shaped by social class
• Shows how Romantic ideas of nature impacted upon the land both within the UK and overseas
• Argues current approaches to conservation and animal rights continue to be influenced by a class-bound Romantic environmental sensibility
• Offers alternative ways of seeing the environment from the Romantic period

Romantic Environmental Sensibility employs a class-based analysis in global studies. The chapters here reveal the extent to which our representations of the land, as well as of the plants, animals and people who live on the land, are imposed upon by habits of thought that are profoundly class-based. It shows how Green Romanticism has simplified Romantic period discourse by bringing to light the multiplicity of perspectives and long-standing inequalities that have been occluded and how current approaches to conservation and animal rights continue to be influenced by a class-bound Romantic environmental sensibility.

Thomas De Quincey’s multivalent engagement with Romantic translation

• Offers new perspectives on De Quincey’s most celebrated essays, his style and politics, and his famously fraught interactions with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Kant, and others
• Traces how De Quincey harnessed translation to reconfigure British Romanticism and open it towards European Romanticisms
• Combines insights from translation studies, critical theory, and Romantic studies in order to establish a novel method for reading Romantic writing

This book investigates how De Quincey’s writing was shaped by his work as a translator. Drawing on a wide range of materials and readings, it traces how De Quincey employed structures of interlinguistic and interdiscursive exchange to reimagine Romanticism. The book examines how his theories and practices of translation served to position his oeuvre, define his style, frame his philosophy and reinvent the meaning of literary creativity. Brecht de Groote traces in particular the ways in which De Quincey used translation to locate British Romanticism in its European context. In shedding new light on De Quincey, de Groote models a new translation-centric approach to the study of Romanticism.

Examines the place of media technology in the literary and intellectual history of Romantic-era Britain

• Explores the literary figuration of media technology and its use
• Offers a fresh reading of Godwin’s corpus, which involves an unusual claim about its fundamental consistency across time and generic boundaries
• Examines major controversies of the period, including: the physiology of the mind; the ethics of novel-reading; practical reading advice; the nature of truth; the nature of afterlife
• Draws attention to the enormous impact of protestant dissent on the literature and philosophy of the Romantic period

Godwin and the Book explores a network of controversies concerning the relationship of media form to social futurity in Romantic-period Britain through the writing of the notorious philosopher-novelist William Godwin (1756–1836). It offers a fresh reading of Godwin’s fifty-year corpus, using evidence from his fiction, philosophy and essays to argue that, throughout his career, he figured books and reading in particular ways in order to defend a set of inherited beliefs about intellectual perfectibility. In the process, it highlights many wider debates that marked out the culture of this period – including disagreements over the physiology of the mind, the ethics of novel-reading, and the social consequences of death – and considers how these debates were intertwined with the formal development of British prose in the period.

A study of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts in Romantic-era Britain

• Offers a detailed examination of the practices of literary manuscript culture, particularly the production, circulation and preservation of manuscripts
• Demonstrates how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, in a nuanced study of the interactions between the two media
• Examines the changing cultural attitudes towards literary manuscripts, and how these changes affected practices and values
• Surveys the impact of digital media on our access to and understanding of historical manuscripts

This book examines how manuscript practices interacted with an expanding print marketplace to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. It unearths the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture, describing the practices by which handwritten documents were written, shared, altered and preserved, and explores the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability. By demonstrating how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between the media of script and print.

Charts the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution

• Offers an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic, broken down into distinct writing modes (memorials, travel memoir, slave narrative, colonial policy paper, emigrant fiction) and contexts (pre- and post-Revolution America, French-Canadian cultural nationalism, the slavery debate, immigration and colonial settlement)
• Looks at familiar Scottish writers (Walter Scott, John Galt) in new ways, while introducing less familiar ones (Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle)
• Brings Scottish Romantic literary studies into new engagements with other fields (such as transatlantic and memory studies)
• Opens up new dialogues between Scottish literature and culture and other literatures and cultures (for example, French-Canadian, Black Diaspora, Indigenous)

Scots, who were at the vanguard of British colonial expansion in North America in the Romantic period, believed that their own nation had undergone an unprecedented transformation in only a short span of time. Scottish writers became preoccupied with collective memory, its powerful role in shaping group identity as well as its delicate fragility. McNeil reveals why we must add collective memory to the list of significant contributions Scots made to a culture of modernity.

WINNER of the BARS First Book Prize 2021!

Explores the nature of Scottish Romanticism through its relationship to improvement

• Provides new insight into the concept of ‘improvement’
• Advances current thinking on Scottish Romanticism
• Identifies how improvement was involved in key aesthetic innovations in the period
• Includes case studies across poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, as the book explores, provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history.

Maps a coherent subfield of Romantic periodical studies through studying the trailblazing Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

• An introduction by two established scholars that articulates a case for the more sustained, systematic study of Romantic periodicals and justifies the volume’s focus by retracing Blackwood’s emergence as the era’s most innovative, influential and controversial literary magazine.
• Features eleven essays modelling how the wide-ranging commentary, reviews and original fiction and verse published in Blackwood’s during its first two decades (1817–37) might meaningfully inform many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.
• Contributes to field-wide bicentenary celebrations and reappraisals both of Blackwood’s and the authors and works – including Shelley’s Frankenstein, Byron’s Don Juan and Keats’s Poems – whose reputations the magazine helped shape.

This book pioneers a subfield of Romantic periodical studies, distinct from its neighbours in adjacent historical periods. Eleven chapters by leading scholars in the field model the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from careful engagements with one of the age’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Engaging with the research potential unlocked by new digital resources for studying Romantic periodicals, they argue that the wide-ranging commentary, reviews and original fiction and verse published in Blackwood’s during its first two decades (1817–37) should inform many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

Reflections on the Bicentenary of the 1819 Massacre of Reformers in Manchester

• Provides a multi-perspectival, historical revaluation of the violence of Peterloo
• Draws on contemporary theorizations of violence by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Rob Nixon to account for the cultural factors leading to Peterloo
• Supplements treatments of Peterloo centering on English history with attention to the significance of that event from Scottish, Irish and North American perspectives

Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence. Contributors explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of people to participate in government were reflected and revised in the verbal and visual culture of the time. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force.

Traces the history of geological travel writing about Scotland across the historical periods of the Scottish Enlightenment and British Romanticism

Discovering the Footsteps of Time probes the development of a distinctively Scottish tradition of geological travel writing from the seventeenth to early nineteenth century. The tradition tracks a fertile interaction of scientific and aesthetic themes, mediated through literary techniques, which highlights the emergence of ‘Romanticism’ as such; a distinctive, recognisable cultural movement of taste and style. Making an important new contribution to our understanding of the ‘discovery’ and representation of Scotland in the long eighteenth century, the book explores why Scotland’s topography has been decisive in the history of geology to such a great extent. Written by a literary academic rather than a geologist, the book is as much concerned with textual strategies and the aesthetic experience of geological discovery as with geology itself.

Key Features

• Adds to our understanding of the ‘discovery of Scotland’ in the 18th and early 19th century, developing a new account of the literary, aesthetic and geological meanings of ‘the land of mountain and flood’ in the period
• Offers new insights about James Hutton’s geological theory by attending to his geological travel writing about Scotland, and also locates Hutton’s work within wider geological debates in and about Scotland
• Builds on previous work on the literariness of scientific writing in the ‘second scientific revolution’
• Contributes to research on ‘Romantic Scotland’ and on the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic scientific travel writing

Restructures and revitalises late Romantic literature as a movement fascinated with competing claims about the reality and knowability of character

The idea of character that many of us still take for granted – whether considered in print as an object of representation, or in life as a congenital ‘bias’ or an acquirable moral possession – is the shared concern of a multidisciplinary debate in reform-era Britain. This book argues for the independent merits of several lesser-known works written in England and Scotland during the 1820s and 1830s, recovering in these works a sustained ideological engagement with the ever-slippery concept of character. The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism studies texts written by contemporary poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, philosophers, phrenologists, sociologists, gossip-mongers and anonymous correspondents. Its main authors of interest include David Hume, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Letitia Landon, Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

With a fresh, interdisciplinary approach, this original intervention in Romantic-era scholarship throws character into relief as an especially problematic concept, not only for the poststructuralist critics who study late Romantic writers, but also for the writers themselves. It changes the ways in which literary scholarship has thought about the development of character discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Key Features

• Describes a synthesis by which debates in many disciplines (novel-writing, periodical-writing, philosophy, phrenology, sociology, medicine, ethics) are distilled into the concept of character associated with literary realism
• Moves a relatively eclectic group of writers to the forefront of a literary culture traditionally narrowed to focus on Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats and their legacies
• Establishes a more comprehensive understanding of late Romantic literary networks by pairing authors rarely studied together (such as William Hazlitt and Letitia Landon)

The first major study of the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and medical culture In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, Megan Coyer’s book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. Key Features Describes a distinctive Scottish medical culture of the Romantic-era and its synergistic relationship with literary cultureAdvances our understanding of the medical content of key periodicals of the nineteenth centuryDraws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim several previously neglected medico-literary figuresExamines the ideological roots of nineteenth-century popular medical writing Case Studies Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh ReviewThe Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late PhysicianThe Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson

Examines dissident conceptions of space in the British Romantic era

Radical Romantics is about utopias and failed utopias, about cities that are palimpsests, and about the unwieldy span of the ocean. From William Blake’s visionary poetry to Lord Byron’s Eastern romances, from prophetic pamphlets to travel narratives, texts of the Romantic era make use of imaginative spaces to reveal the contours and limits of territorial sovereignty. In doing so, they raise fundamental questions about our understanding of both territorial and imagined space. What are the means by which people can conceive of geographical space without resorting to the terms of nationalism? Is it possible to imagine a space beyond territory, as movement itself? How can we articulate the overlap between mapped and lived space?

Key Features

• Engages with the critical frameworks of cultural geography, cartography, and the burgeoning field of oceanic studies
• Reformulates theories of colonization and empire in the Romantic period
• Puts canonical poetry in dialogue with travel tales and prophetic tracts

Redefines Romantic sociability through a reading of social contract theory

The Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement’s coherence in contract theory’s definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century.

Key Features

• Develops new understanding of Romanticism as political movement
• Offers fresh readings of canonical works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Shelley and Carlyle by tracing their implicit dialogue with the political philosophy of Rousseau and other Enlightenment political theorists
• Shows that the philosophical routes of Romanticism and its ties to German Idealism originate in empiricism
• Carries important consequences for the contemporary understanding of the self, an understanding that is partly rooted in notions that originated with the Romantics

Redefines the British historical novel as a key site in the construction of British national identity The British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as ‘land of liberty’ and it positions Scott in relation to this tradition. Key Features Recovers the richness of the historical novel and history writing before Walter Scott, including the contribution of women writers to this debate Explores how historical fiction probes anxieties at the rise of commerce, the question of empire, and radical political change Rewrites our understanding of Scott and his relation to the earlier British historical novel

Revises established understandings of British women writers’ contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress

Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women’s literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of “women’s progress” from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion’s role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women’s literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use “women’s progress” to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.

Key Features:

• Establishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development
• Uncovers evidence of women writers’ participation in the Scottish Enlightenment’s theorization of sentiment and historical progress
• Provides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect