Romanticism And The Rise Of English

Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 Romanticism and the Rise of English addresses a peculiar development in contemporary literary criticism: the disappearance of the history of the English language as a relevant topic. Elfenbein argues for a return not to older modes of criticism, but to questions about the relation between literature and language that have vanished from contemporary investigation. His book is an example of a kind of work that has often been called for but rarely realized—a social philology that takes seriously the formal and institutional forces shaping the production of English. This results not only in a history of English, but also in a recovery of major events shaping English studies as a coherent discipline. This book points to new directions in literary criticism by arguing for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history.

The Romantic period was one of the most creative, intense and turbulent periods of English literature, an age marked by revolution, reaction, and reform in politics, and by the invention of imaginative literature in its distinctively modern form. This History presents an engaging account of six decades of literary production around the turn of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the most up-to-date research, the essays are designed both to provide a narrative of Romantic literature, and to offer new and stimulating readings of the key texts. One group of essays addresses the various locations of literary activity - both in England and, as writers developed their interests in travel and foreign cultures, across the world. A second set of essays traces how texts responded to great historical and social change. With a comprehensive bibliography, timeline and index, this volume will be an important resource for research and teaching in the field.

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today. Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers: Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period; Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies; New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art; The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics; European and Global Romanticism; The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

Now in paperback, the great historian's provocative account of the rise of Romanticism. Combining his incomparable knowledge of English history with an original interpretation of British literature of the late 18th and early nineteenth century, E. P. Thompson traces the intellectual influences and societal pressures that gave rise to the English Romantic movement. Writing with great passion and literary force, Thompson examines the interaction between politics and literature at the beginning of the modern age, focusing in on the turbulent 1790s -- the time of the French and American revolutions -- through the celebrated writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a period, or a division of their subject, and entitle it "Romanticism" or "the Romantic School." Writers of English literary history, while recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the "Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered. It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as in Germany or France. There never was precisely a "romantic school" or an all-pervading romantic fashion in England.