Enlightening Romanticism Romancing The Enlightenment

As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelistic concerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension. Among the issues engaged are the eighteenth-century novel's development of emotional interiority, including theories of melancholia; the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel; tensions between rationality and romantic affect; issues of aesthetics and politics; and constructions of gender, genre, and race. Rather than positing a simple opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress and a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays trace the putatively 'Romantic' in the early 1700s as well as the long legacy of 'Enlightenment' values and ideas well into the nineteenth century. The volume concludes with responses from Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt, who situate the essays and elaborate on the stakes.

As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelistic concerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension. Among the issues engaged are the eighteenth-century novel's development of emotional interiority, including theories of melancholia; the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel; tensions between rationality and romantic affect; issues of aesthetics and politics; and constructions of gender, genre, and race. Rather than positing a simple opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress and a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays trace the putatively 'Romantic' in the early 1700s as well as the long legacy of 'Enlightenment' values and ideas well into the nineteenth century. The volume concludes with responses from Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt, who situate the essays and elaborate on the stakes.

Friendship has always been a universal category of human relationships and an influential motif in literature, but it is rarely discussed as a theme in its own right. In her study of how friendship gives direction and shape to new ideas and novel strategies of plot, character formation, and style in the British novel from the 1760s to the 1830s, Katrin Berndt argues that friendship functions as a literary expression of philosophical values in a genre that explores the psychology and the interactions of the individual in modern society. In the literary historical period in which the novel became established as a modern genre, friend characters were omnipresent, reflecting enlightenment philosophy’s definition of friendship as a bond that civilized public and private interactions and was considered essential for the attainment of happiness. Berndt’s analyses of genre-defining novels by Frances Brooke, Mary Shelley, Sarah Scott, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth show that the significance of friendship and the increasing variety of novelistic forms and topics represent an overlooked dynamic in the novel’s literary history. Contributing to our understanding of the complex interplay of philosophical, socio-cultural and literary discourses that shaped British fiction in the later Hanoverian decades, Berndt’s book demonstrates that novels have conceived the modern individual not in opposition to, but in interaction with society, continuing Enlightenment debates about how to share the lives and the experiences of others.

Inventing the Gothic Corpse shows how a series of bold experiments in eighteenth-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device. For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure. Yael Shapira’s book tracks this change at it unfolds in eighteenth-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs. Carver. In tracing this long historical arc, Shapira illuminates a hidden side of the history of the novel: the dead body, she shows, helps the fledgling literary form confront its own controversial ability to entertain. Her close scrutiny of fictional corpses across the long eighteenth century reveals how the dead body functions as a test of the novel’s intentions, a chance for novelists to declare their allegiances in the battle between the didactic and the “merely” pleasurable.

This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.

Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities