The Romantic Generation

Accompanied by a sound disc (digital; 4 3/4 in.) by the same name which is available in Multimedia : CD 6.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the age of great scientific discovery is a groundbreaking achievement.

Comprehensive reading of 'late' Wordsworth, considering his work in dialogue with the poetic, cultural and political battles of his day.

In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. DeQuincey's charges and the controversy they ignited have shaped readers' responses to the work of such writers as Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Clare ever since. But what did plagiarism mean some two hundred years ago in Britain? What was at stake when early nineteenth-century authors levied such charges against each other? How would matters change if we were to evaluate these writers by the standards of their own national moment? And what does our moral investment in plagiarism tell us about ourselves and about our relationship to the Romantic myth of authorship? In Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period, Tilar Mazzeo historicizes the discussion of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plagiarism and demonstrates that it had little in common with our current understanding of the term. The book offers a major reassessment of the role of borrowing, textual appropriation, and narrative mastery in British Romantic literature and provides a new picture of the period and its central aesthetic contests. Above all, Mazzeo challenges the almost exclusive modern association of Romanticism with originality and takes a fresh look at some of the most familiar writings of the period and the controversies surrounding them.

Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.

A striking literary biography by a significant and talented young writer

In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amélie and Frédéric Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by a determination to live their faith in a modern world. Rejecting both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy, the romantic Catholics advocated a middle way, in which a revitalized Catholic faith and liberty formed the basis for modern society. Harrison traces the history of nineteenth-century France and, in parallel, the life course of these individuals as they grow up, learn independence, and take on the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood. Although the shared goals of the romantic Catholics were never realized in French politics and culture, Harrison’s work offers a significant corrective to the traditional understanding of the opposition between religion and the secular republican tradition in France.