This book explains why 'fracture' and 'fragmentation' are two critical concepts that are particularly suited to understanding what is special about Romanticism. The book also discusses how Romanticism comes to be both an historical as well as a philosophical category, and offers new readings of key Romantic writers.

Between the independence of the colonies and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called "fragments."American Fragments argues that this archive of deliberately unfinished writing reimagined the place of marginalized individuals in a country that was itself still unfinished.

Historians and literary scholars tend to agree that British intellectual culture underwent a fundamental transformation between 1770 and 1845. Yet they are unusually divided about the nature of that transformation and whether it is best understood as an epistemic rupture from, or a continuous dialogue with, the long eighteenth century. Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 rethinks the ways in which we understand the historical writing and the historical consciousness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that British historicism developed largely in quasi and para-historical genres such as memoir, biography, verse, fiction, and painting, rather than in works of 'real' history. In a number of inter-related essays on changing generic forms, styles, methods, and standards, the collection demonstrates that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary 'Romanticism' not only intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing, but that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis-a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling and imagination in historical writing-that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. In exploring this theme, the volume also seeks to consider wider questions about the philosophy of history and literature, including questions of truth, evidence, professionalization, disciplinary strategies, and methodology. At its heart is the idea that literary texts and other artistic representations of history can have historical value, and should therefore be taken seriously by practitioners of history in all its forms.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

A captivating exploration of the newly reimagined world of sound and sense in Britain in the decades around 1800.

This book provides new period-appropriate concepts for understanding Romantic-era physical disability through function and aesthetics.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of the latest research on this topic. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of revolutionary turbulence and international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook covers key themes and concepts in Romantic studies as well as less chartered topics such as freedom of speech, literature and drugs, Romantic oratory, and literary uses of dialect. All the major male and female Romantic authors are included along with numerous lesser-known writers, the emphasis throughout being on the diversity of Romantic writing and the complexities and internal divisions of the culture that sustained it. The volume strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty to provide an accessible guide to current thinking and a conceptual reorganization of this fast-moving field.

This book examines the reception of British Romanticism in India and East Asia (including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan). Building on recent scholarship on “Global Romanticism”, it develops a reciprocal, cross-cultural model of scholarship, in which “Asian Romanticism” is recognized as itself an important part of the Romantic literary tradition. It explores the connections between canonical British Romantic authors (including Austen, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth) and prominent Asian writers (including Natsume Sōseki, Rabindranath Tagore, and Xu Zhimo). The essays also challenge Eurocentric assumptions about reception and periodization, exploring how, since the early nineteenth century, British Romanticism has been creatively adapted and transformed by Asian writers.

Traces the practice of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - and its uses by Romantic-period writers.

What associates fragmentation with Romanticism? In this book, Alexander Regier explains how fracture and fragmentation form a lens through which some central concerns of Romanticism can be analysed in a particularly effective way. These categories also supply a critical framework for a discussion of fundamental issues concerning language and thought in the period. Over the course of the volume, Regier discusses fracture and fragmentation thematically and structurally, offering new readings of Wordsworth, Kant, Burke, Keats, and De Quincey, as well as analysing central intellectual presuppositions of the period. He also highlights Romanticism's importance for contemporary scholarship, especially in the writings of Benjamin and de Man. More generally, Regier's discussion of fragmentation exposes a philosophical problem that lies behind the definition of Romanticism.