In anticipation of our forthcoming special issue on ‘The Minerva Press and the Literary Marketplace’, this post is the first in a series by Colette Davies reflecting on the role played by the firm during the Romantic era and its somewhat tarnished reputation in the following centuries—a challenge that the essays in our new issue seek to address. Continue reading →
At the conclusion of his speech unveiling the Memorial Fountain at Cockermouth, H. J. Palmer declaimed ‘Poets are born, not made’, but, as Saeko Yoshikawa demonstrates throughout William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, national figures … Continue reading →
Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: ‘A Tribe of Authoresses’ is the first book to appear in a new series, ‘Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850’, edited by Tim Fulford and Alan Vardy. This … Continue reading →
There’s an infinitive verb that scholars have been using with increasing relish over the last decade or so: ‘to problematise’. I am a fan neither of the term nor of the practice, believing that for … Continue reading →
‘Would that the criterion of a scholar’s utility were the number and moral values of the truths, which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge exclaimed in 1817. … Continue reading →
Perhaps the first question many students, and indeed scholars, of long nineteenth-century Britain will ask upon reading the title of Flame in the Mountains: Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths and the Welsh Hymn is: just how … Continue reading →
Beginning in Germany in the 1770s with the Sturm und Drang movement, by the 1820s Romanticism had swept through Europe conquering the French, Italian and Spanish literary worlds, and then from the West to Eastern … Continue reading →
Begin at the beginning, with the first line of the ‘Introduction’ to Devin Griffiths’s The Age of Analogy: Literature between the Darwins: ‘In the summer of 1857, Charles Darwin unlocked the clasp of a new … Continue reading →
Those seeking some light reading on one of the early nineteenth-century’s foremost commentators on British literature and culture, or a gentle introduction to Hazlitt’s radical political writing, will not be reaching for this book. Gilmartin’s … Continue reading →
Treading new paths over familiar ground, Talissa J. Ford’s Radical Romantics: Prophets, Pirates and the Space Beyond Nation explores the notion of nation through those who bend and break its ‘literal or figurative boundaries’ (p. 2). … Continue reading →