Romanticism is notoriously hard to define. There are, indeed, those who believe that a concept which has by now been projected through so many perspectives has become so miasmic in the process that the very term should be dropped from the critical vocabulary. This volume demonstrates its continuing importance as a necessary point of focus. In Questioning Romanticism, John Beer assembles eleven original essays which consider various aspects of contemporary critical practice and Romantic literature. While providing a coherent reconstruction of Romantic literary theory, the collection offers a diverse and expansive sense of Romanticism's concerns -- addressing topics such as mimesis, phenomenology, gender, language, metaphor and aesthetics. The contributors are Martin Aske, John Beer, Drummond Bone, Frederick Burwick, A. C. Goodson, Nigel Leask, Philip Martin, Anne Mellor, Lucy Newlyn, Tilottama Rajan, and Susan Wolfson. "Questioning Romanticism is a very strong and important collection of essays by scholars of international reputation. They are focused on the attempt to rethink the philosophical, aesthetic, linguistic, and social grounds of Romantic theory. Rather than seeking to present Romanticism as a unified school of thought, the essays in this collection suggest that the Romantic desire to achieve a unified theory of life and literature must be read against an equally strong assertion of questioning, irony, and uncertainty. By drawing on the differing views of a wide range contemporary Romantic theorists (feminism, language theory, hermeneutics, reader-response, formalism, phenomenology, aesthetics), the collection provides a comprehensive, yet diverse focus on thebroad-ranging concerns that shaped how Romantic writers theorized their writing. It is unique in its primary focus on reconstructing the historical complexities, the productive uncertainties, and the shifting ground of Romantic theory." -- Alan Bewell, University of Toronto

Drawing upon a wide range of source material, this study reassesses the idea that the Romantic defence of spiritual and humanistic culture developed as a reaction to the perceived individualistic, philistine values of the science of political economy.

The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics not only preoccupied British politics but also informed the romantic period's most prominent literary works. This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues.

How have our conceptions of truth been shaped by romantic literature? This question lies at the heart of this examination of the concept of truth both in romantic writing and in modern criticism. The romantic idea of truth has long been depicted as aesthetic, imaginative and ideal. Tim Milnes challenges this picture, demonstrating a pragmatic strain in the writing of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge in particular, that bears a close resemblance to the theories of modern pragmatist thinkers such as Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas. Romantic pragmatism, Milnes argues, was in turn influenced by recent developments within linguistic empiricism. This book will be of interest to readers of romantic literature, but also to philosophers, literary theorists, and intellectual historians.

This companion is the first book of its kind to focus on the whole of European Romanticism. Describes the way in which the Romantic Movement swept across Europe in the early nineteenth century. Covers the national literatures of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain. Addresses common themes that cross national borders, such as orientalism, Napoleon, night, nature, and the prestige of the fragment. Includes cross-disciplinary essays on literature and music, literature and painting, and the general system of Romantic arts. Features 35 essays in all, from leading scholars in America, Australia, Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland.

A one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research.

Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary theory. The central contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic - despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought. The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou. In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism. Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism. Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements. This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.

Bridging the gulf between materialist and idealist approaches this study, informed by an historical awareness of Romantic hermeneutics and its later developments, examines how readers are imagined, addressed, and figured in Romantic poetry

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today. Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers: Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period; Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies; New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art; The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics; European and Global Romanticism; The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

"Romanticism - and Byron" is a book in two parts. In the first part, Dr Cochran examines "Romanticism" and shows that it is a word meaning anything, and therefore nothing. It is an academic construct created by academics, and has no basis in the writings of the early nineteenth century. Its continued use, argues Dr Cochran, is a modern marketing phenomenon solely. In the second part, Dr Cochran examines the life and work of Byron in the non-"romantic" context of his contemporaries. He shows how Byron's antithetical nature created problems when he was forced into compromising situations with friends who were close to parts of his mind, yet irreconcilable with one another. This "mobility", argues Cochran, was often an embarrassment for Byron's social life, but of great benefit to his creativity. This part of the book features chapters on Shelley, Scott, Blake, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and is notable for the amount of original archive documentation with which Cochran illustrates his theme.