This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or "folk") cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics' discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers' devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures. Celestina Savonius-Wroth is Assistant Professor, History Librarian, and Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She holds a doctorate in British history from Indiana University Bloomington.

This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of interest in British vernacular (or “folk”) cultures, which has often been elided with the emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics’ discovery of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures, developing in response to the Reformers’ devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world, seasonal festivities, and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and antiquarian scholarship; informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period of religious instability after the Reformation; and, over the course of the eighteenth century, colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought, both radical and conservative, grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular cultures.

For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion's two-part structure presents forty-two essays on major topics, by leading international experts, cross-referenced to an extensive alphabetical section covering all the principal figures, events, and movements in the broad culture of the period. Aimed at students and general readers as well as scholars, the essays constitute an accessible, pluralistic, and modern social history of the epoch; the alphabetical entries can either be used alongside them, for deeper information on specific subjects, or as a free-standing reference tool. The volume as a whole embraces both high and low culture, and explores its subject across the whole breadth of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The book's multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms-its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and above all literature-and as a historical epoch of 'revolutionary' transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society. In this period Wedgwood turned taste into a commercial enterprise, Pierce Egan took Britain by storm with his sensational accounts of low-life in the capital, and Mary Shelley created, in Frankenstein, one of the enduring myths of scientific advance. The Companion revitalizes canonical Romantic figures in the context of the historical events, political and linguistic debates, commercial pressures, and plebeian subcultures of their day, as well as bringing back into historical focus individuals and events whose impact has often been muffled or forgotten. With over 100 integrated illustrations, bibliographies accompanying all the major essays, and an index to Part 1, this is the most comprehensive volume of its kind, offering a unique breadth of information to scholars and students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, literature, and history. EDITORIAL BOARD: John Brewer (University of California) Marilyn Butler (Exeter College, University of Oxford) James Chandler (University of Chicago) Jerome J. McGann ( University of Virginia, Charlottesville) Mark Philp (Oriel College, Oxford) Robert Webb (University of Maryland)

Exploring the intense relationship between Romantic literature and Methodism, Helen Boyles argues that writers from both movements display an ambivalent attitude towards the expression of deep emotional and spiritual experience. Boyles takes up the disparaging characterization of William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets as 'Methodistical,' showing how this criticism was rooted in a suspicion of the 'enthusiasm' with which the Methodist movement was negatively identified. Historically, enthusiasm has generated hostility and embarrassment, a legacy that Boyles suggests provoked concerted efforts by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and the Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley to cleanse it of its derogatory associations. While they distanced themselves from enthusiasm's dangerous and hysterical manifestations, writers and religious leaders also identified with the precepts and inspiration of a language and religion of the heart. Boyles's analysis encompasses a range of literary genres from the Methodist sermon and hymn, to literary biography, critical review, lyric and epic poem. Balancing analysis of creative content with a consideration of its critical reception, she offers readers a detailed analysis of Wordsworth's relationship to popular evangelism within a analytical framework that incorporates Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt.

The bicentenary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Review has provided the foremost scholars in the field with the opportunity to re-examine the pervasive significance of the most important literary review of the Romantic period. These essays assess the controversial role played by the Edinburgh Review in the development of Romantic literature and explore its sense of 'Scottishness' in the context of early nineteenth-century British culture.

The three volumes weave together the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their peoples. Volume II includes the formation of the nation-state, the industrialization of the British economy and the emergence of Victorian society.

This book provides a historical cultural sociological analysis of cultural representations of Italy in England and later Britain, from the period of the Italian Renaissance to the present day. Rooted in a critical account of orthodox social scientific approaches to thinking and theorising cultural representation, the study combines analytical frames and conceptual apparatus from Bourdieu’s Field theory and Yale School cultural sociology. Drawing from a wide range of empirical data and studies, the book demonstrates the significance of representations of the Italian peninsula and its people for exploring a range of cultural sociological phenomena, from the ‘classing’ and ‘commodification’ of Italy to the role of Italian symbolism for negotiating cultural trauma, identify formation, and expressions of cultural edification, veneration, and emulation. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of (cultural) sociology, history, anthropology, Italian studies as well as scholars in international studies interested in intercultural exchange and representations of other nations, national cultures, and otherness.