Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840


Book Description

Over the last twenty years, critics and historians of the late Eighteenth-century have developed a multidisciplinary approach to the history of culture. This dialogue between literary critics and theorists, art historians and social historians is remapping the relations between culture and society, politics and aesthetics, law and representation. These essays by twelve internationally known scholars return 'Taste' to a central position in the discussion of nation, culture and aesthetics in the period.




Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture


Book Description

While recent scholarship has usefully positioned Burns within the context of British Romanticism as a spokesperson of Scottish national identity, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture considers Burns's impact in the United States, Canada, and South America, where he has served variously as a site of cultural memory and of creative negotiation. Ambitious in its scope, the volume is divided into five sections that explore: transatlantic concerns in Burns's own work, Burns's early publication in North America, Burns's reception in the Americas, Burns's creation as a site of cultural memory, and extra-literary remediations of Burns, including contemporary digital representations. By tracing the transatlantic modulations of the poet and songwriter and his works, Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture sheds new light on the circuits connecting Scotland and Britain with the evolving cultures of the Americas from the late eighteenth century to the present.




Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality


Book Description

The twelve essays in this edited collection examine the experience of reading, from the late medieval period to the twentieth century. Central to the theme of the book is the role of materiality: how the physical object – book, manuscript, libretto – affects the experience of the person reading it.




Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel


Book Description

At the heart of Wordsworth's concerns is the question of how travel - both foreign and everyday - might also become an adventure into philosophy itself. This is an art of travel both as an approach to experience - one that draws on habits in order to revise them in the shock of new - and as a poetic approach that gives voice to the singular and foreign through the unique shapes of verse. Close readings of Wordsworth's 'pictures of Nature, Man, and Society' show how the natural is entangled with - and not simply opposed to, as many critics have suggested - the social, the political and the historical in this verse. This book draws on both eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature, and debates in modern critical theory, to highlight Wordsworth's remarkable originality and his ongoing ability to transform our theoretical prejudgements in the unknown territory of the travel encounter.




William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England


Book Description

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.




Eighteenth-Century Vitalism


Book Description

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.




British Historical Fiction before Scott


Book Description

In the half century before Walter Scott's Waverley , dozens of popular novelists produced historical fictions for circulating libraries. This book examines eighty-five popular historical novels published between 1762 and 1813, looking at how the conventions of the genre developed through a process of imitation and experimentation.




Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England


Book Description

This book analyzes the relation between print cultures and eighteenth-century literary and political practices and, identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, offers readings of key texts that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres.




The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel


Book Description

Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks.




The Works of Charlotte Smith, Part II vol 10


Book Description

Charlotte Turner Smith held a central position during the formative years of the British Romantic period. Smith's work includes eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French. This edition reveals the extent to which Smith's work in this form constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry.