Sheds new light on the presence and impact of Continental European literary traditions in post-Napoleonic Britain.

This collection of essays offers an image of Byron not only as a poet – for which he is best known – but as a translator of foreign literature and culture. To recover this underexplored element of Byron’s work, the contributors examine his translated pieces in both textual and extra-textual contexts, including analysis of manuscripts, composition history, publishing history, and other literary and historical factors. They explore the motives behind Byron’s choice to translate in the first place, as well as reconstructing the translational methods he applied, and his ideas on translation and the role of the translator in general. The book focuses too on Byron’s ‘geographical mobility’, which also involved the act of translation, though in a metaphorical sense. The cosmopolitan poet mediated and interpreted all the time: foreign cultures, behaviours, modes of living, customs and habits. In this sense, translation becomes for the poet a dynamic ‘movement’ between languages, across texts and around various contexts, offering Byron a vital space for the articulation of his ideas. Byron’s translation work reminds us how Romantic writers and readers sought to learn about and engage with the wider world and its various languages.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these individual national romanticisms we need to see them not as isolated phenomena but rather as participating, via translation and other modes of reception, in a transnational or regional romanticism configured around the idea of a shared cultural inheritance in ‘the North’.

This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

In 1797 Robert Southey published a richly detailed account of his journey in Spain and Portugal between December 1795 and May 1796, from his arrival in Coruna in the northwest of the Spanish coast to the heart of Castile and into Madrid, before making his way to Lisbon. Structured as a series of letters written as he travelled across the Iberian Peninsula, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal engages with the tradition of English travelogues, while borrowing traits from other genres such as the journal, translation, literary criticism, history, and the picturesque guidebook. On his way, Southey comments on every aspect of Spanish and Portuguese society, from local food and wine, bizarre customs, literature and theatregoing, to Iberian politics and religion. In his letters Southey, who would grow to become one of the leading Hispanists in late Georgian England, contrasts the political, religious, cultural and social systems of Britain and two of the oldest nations in the European continent in a way that raises important questions about cultural contact and transmission during the Romantic period. This edition critically reassesses Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal by looking at Southey’s deeply ambiguous cultural cosmopolitanism and his life-long investment in all things Spanish and Portuguese.