Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Calling into question that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that the Romantic poets, far from being indifferent or hostile to popular forms of literature were actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit ideological value. Whether in their proccupation with fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to suit their own democratic, secular and skeptical ethos--a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.

Approaching the work of Romantic-era British women poets through the lenses of public radicalism, war, and poetic form. This compelling study recovers the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era. Stephen C. Behrendt reveals the range and diversity of their writings, offering new perspectives on the work of dozens of women whose poetry has long been ignored or marginalized in traditional literary history. British Romanticism was once thought of as a cultural movement defined by a small group of male poets. This book grants women poets their proper place in the literary tradition of the time. In an approach ripe for classroom teaching, Behrendt first reviews the subject thematically, exploring the ways in which the poems addressed both public concerns and private experiences. He next examines the use of particular genres, including the sonnet and various other long and short forms. In the concluding chapters, Behrendt explores the impact of national identity, providing the first extensive study of Romantic-era poetry by women from Scotland and Ireland. In recovering the lives and work of these women, Behrendt reveals their active participation within the rich cultural community of writers and readers throughout the British Isles. This study will be a key resource for scholars, teachers, and students in British literary studies, women’s studies, and cultural history.

Winner of the Book Prize of the American Conference on Romanticism

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

Why care about poetic form and its intricacies, other than in nostalgia for a bygone era of criticism? The purpose of this book is to refresh today this care for criticism, applying a historically aware formalist reading to poetic form in Romanticism and showing how in theory and practice Romantic writers addressed, debated, tested, and contested fundamental questions about what is at stake in the poetic forming of language. In the process, it suggests the importance of these conflicted inquiries for contemporary critical discussion and demonstrates the pleasures of attending to the complex changes of form in poetic writing. After an introductory chapter on the controversies about poetic form and formalism from the Romantic era to our own, succeeding chapters consider particular instances in Romantic poetry in which experimental agendas or unsettled traditions promote an awareness of new textual possibilities. The author shows how Blake's Poetical Sketches predicts many of the key issues of Romantic theory and practice, and how Coleridge's ambivalent engagement with simile impels him to address the very foundations of poetic form. A chapter on Wordsworth's revision of an episode in The Prelude demonstrates how a repeated reworking of form virtually characterizes the work of autobiography, and the dilemma of self-formation is also the focus of a chapter on Byron's seemingly perverse choice of the heroic couplet in The Corsair. Keats, too, is shown to wrestle with the issue of self and form at the end of his career in his personal lyrics to Fanny Browne, which subverted the formalism of the "Great Odes" of 1819, the celebrated icons of New Criticism. A final chapter describes Shelley's investment of poetic performance with social agency in two seemingly opposite but related modes--the political exhortation of The Mask of Anarchy and the intimate addresses to Jane and Edward Williams. In an afterword, the author reviews recent attacks on formalist criticism and argues for the specific value of shaped language as one of the texts in which culture is written and revised.

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.

This book offers new analyzes of canonical texts, contextualizations of Romantic forms in relation to war, nationalism and empire, reassessments of neglected and marginalized writers and explorations of the relationship between form and reader. It showcases a range of new approaches that are informed by deconstruction, theology and new technology.