Unlike the first two volumes of "ANGLES" on the English-Speaking World, this special issue does not originate in a set of conference papers. The idea of compiling a collection of essays on Romanticism emerged from the unusually strong concentration on Romantic studies among the graduate students of the English Department a couple of years ago. This volume places their work in the context of distinguished international scholars of greater seniority, scholars who have become academic contacts through conferences and assessment committees, and whose contributions I am very pleased to be able to include alongside the works of local contributors. The Romantic generations of the title of this volume thus strike a number of different chords: generations of scholars in Romantic studies; conventional divisions of Romantic poets into first, second and possibly third generations; the self-generative aspect of Romanticism; the awareness of poetic reputation and the image and afterlife of the poet. The collection spans just over a hundred years, from the 1780s to the 1890s, and while not in any way attempting to define Romanticism or raise issues of periodization the volume allows for the continued existence of Romantic features right until the end of the nineteenth century. Poetry looms large in this issue of ANGLES; apart from Ian Duncan's essay on Hume, Scott, and the "Rise of Fiction",' all the other essays are in some way concerned with the Romantic poet and his poetry. The Romantic poet is thus represented as a collector and editor of ballads, as a political radical and printmaker, as other to himself, essentially ignorant of the process of poetic composition, as a rival and collaborator with other poets, or as a poet long dead, the subject of successive generations of poetic lament. The boundaries between poetry and the visual arts is explored in a couple of the essays; indeed, the rivalry between portraiture and literature pervades no less than three of the contributions, and no matter whether the subject of inquiry is the image of the poet or the image of the poet's mother, the Romantic poet displays a high degree of self-consciousness with respect to both literary and visual media. Romantic generations generate both selves and others in poetry and portraiture.

These essays express a common belief that the study of Romantic literature must be at once professionally serious and personally engaging. Topics discussed range from Wordsworth to Lady Caroline Lamb, and from Blake and Burke to the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Each essay also offers close readings of essential works on English and Irish Romanticism. Introducing the collection is a tribute by the celebrated Romanticist Peter Manning.

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

A striking literary biography by a significant and talented young writer

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

William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic provides a truly comprehensive reading of 'late' Wordsworth and the full arc of his career from (1814–1840) revealing that his major poems after Waterloo contest poetic and political issues with his younger contemporaries: Keats, Shelley and Byron. Refuting conventional models of influence, where Wordsworth 'fathers' the younger poets, Cox demonstrates how Wordsworth's later writing evolved in response to 'second generation' romanticism. After exploring the ways in which his younger contemporaries rewrote his 'Excursion', this volume examines how Wordsworth's 'Thanksgiving Ode' enters into a complex conversation with Leigh Hunt and Byron; how the delayed publication of 'Peter Bell' could be read as a reaction to the Byronic hero; how the older poet's River Duddon sonnets respond to Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'; and how his later volumes, particularly 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837', engage in a complicated erasure of poets who both followed and predeceased him.

This is the first book to attempt a theological portrait of a pivotal generation in the history of the English Free Churches. It does so through a dual strategy: firstly, studying the theological development of key leaders over several decades; and secondly, capturing the state of the Unions -- Congregational and Baptist -- through the freeze frames provided by their biggest denominational controversies in the 1870s and 1880s respectively. Archetypal Victorians whose working lives stretched through most of that long reign, in the 1860s this generation inherited leadership from a predecessor that had eked out the dying momentum of the Evangelical Revival. Bathed in the formidable energy of a newly discovered Romanticism, they wrestled strenuously with the fresh challenges it exposed them to while engaged in lengthy ministries in thriving city churches. They variously tried rejecting and embracing the liberal transformation of their evangelical heritage, or even, in the case of R.W. Dale, somehow achieving their synthesis. Yet in the end neither he nor C.H. Spurgeon, nor anyone else, really found an expression of Christian faith that the next generation could take up and build with, and their successors were to preside over the first obvious stages of a long, deep, and traumatic decline. At a time when this period is again being scrutinized for that elusive 'answer', the author will not claim to have tracked it down there; but the conclusion nonetheless indicates that this study surprisingly helped open up vistas much broader than those of the nineteenth-century debates.