You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
By examining four sentimental travelogues written by British women travelers during the American and French Revolutions, Political Affairs of the Heart argues that this genre, by combining eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility, constitutes a significant site of women's engagement in national and gender politics.
The Poetics of Palliation argues that Romanticism developed richer literary therapies than its contemporary reception remembers. By reading Romantic writers against Georgian medical ethics, Poetics recovers their models of literature as comfort and sustenance, challenging a health humanities tradition that sees literary therapy primarily as cure.
In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.
Afterword: Speed Listening -- Notes -- Credits -- Acknowledgments -- Index
This is the first book to tell the story of the Romantic album and its original poetry. It rediscovers a huge number of overlooked Romantic poems, and reconstructs how albums and their owners were represented in print
In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not. Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their fam...
What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, this book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.
How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture. From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcul...
Critics have long understood the development of Romantic aesthetics as a turning point in the history of literary theory, a turn that is responsible for theories of mind and body that continue to inform our understandings of subjectivity and embodiment today. Yet the question of what aesthetic experience can "do" grates against the fact that much Romantic writing represents subjects as not actually in charge of the feelings they feel, the dreams they dream, or the actions they take. In response to this dilemma, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation argues that being moved contrary to one's will is itself an aesthetic phenomenon explored by Romantic poets whose experiments with poetic form and...
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the frie...