In February 1822 the writer and adventurer Edward John Trelawny arrived in Pisa to make the acquaintance of his heroes Shelley and Byron, leaving a broken marriage and an exotic seafaring career behind him. He became a close companion to them and their circle, and this collection of his reminiscences is one of the most fresh and intriguing documents of the Romantic age. It records his initial meeting with a cynical and flippant Byron, his impressions of a youthful, otherworldly Shelley and, most memorably, the poet's death at sea and the subsequent burning of his body on the sand. Trelawny's Records combine vigorous prose, vivid description and mythmaking to create one of the most memorable portraits of an age. Rosemary Ashton's new introduction explores the mysterious life and quixotic character of Trelawny, and this edition includes all the author's later revisions. Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881) was one of the most curious figures of the English Romantic Movement, and spent his long life travelling extensively as a naval officer, biographer and adventurer. After a brief education, Trelawny was assigned as a volunteer in the Royal Navy by the age of thirteen, and led an unaccomplished naval career until his resignation at nineteen. He met Shelley and Byron in Italy in 1822, where he became fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the two poets. His Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author, written after both their deaths, is the end-product of this strange obsession. An incorrigible romancer, Trelawny had three marriages - the second of which was to Tersitza, sister of the Greek warlord Odysseus Androutsos, whose cause he had joined and whose mountain fortress he looked after when Odysseus was arrested. He died after a fall at the age of eighty-eight, in England, and his ashes were buried in Rome in a plot adjacent to Shelley's grave. Rosemary Ashton was educated at the universities of Aberdeen, Heidelberg and Cambridge. She taught English literature at University College London from 1974 to 2012, and is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and an Honorary Fellow of UCL. She has published critical biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes, two books on Anglo-German literary and cultural relations in the nineteenth century, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 (1980) and Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (1986), and two books about Victorian radicalism, 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006) and Victorian Bloomsbury (2012). David Wright (1920-1994) was born in Johannesburg and came to England aged fourteen to attend the Northampton School for the Deaf. His first poem was published shortly after graduating from Oriel College, Oxford, and he published poetry throughout his life, including Moral Stories (1954), Monologue of a Deaf Man (1958), Metrical Observations (1980) and Elegies (1990). He was both a remarkable poet and a remarkable editor, responsible for, among others, the Penguin Classics edition of Edward Thomas's Selected Poems and Prose, The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse and, with John Heath-Stubbs, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse. He was also the author of a number of books on Portugal, a biography of Roy Campbell and a memoir, Deafness: A Personal Account.

Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic achievement. Madeleine Callaghan explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their developing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.

This book guides through some six centuries of English literature, beginning with Chaucer's time, and goes on to analyse the background, interconnections and major achievements of individual writers in each period. It is useful to the student of English literature and to the general reader.

He was born in the year Dr Johnson died, and died in the year A.E. Houseman and Conan Doyle were born. The 75 years of Leigh Hunt's life uniquely span two distinct eras of English life and literature. A major player in the Romantic movement, the intimate and first publisher of Keats and Shelley, friend of Byron, Hazlitt and Lamb, Hunt lived on to become an elder statesman of Victorianism, the friend and chamption of Tennyson and Dickens, awarded a sate pension by Queen Victoria. Jailed in his twenties for insulting the Prince of Wales, Hunt ended his long, productive life vainly seeking the Poet Laureatship with fawning poems to Victoria. A tirelessly prolific poet, essayist, editor and critic, he has been described as having no rival in the history of English criticism. Yet Hunt's remarkable life story has never been fully told. Anthony Holden's deeply researched and vibrantly written biography gives full due to this minor poet - but major influence on his great Romantic contempories.

Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

First published 1984. In a provocative study, this book argues that the problems posed by Shelley’s notoriously difficult style must be understood in relation to his ambivalence towards language itself as an artistic medium — the tension between the potential of language to mirror emotional experience and the recognition of it’s inevitable limitations. Through an exposition of Shelley’s idea of language, as reflected in his theoretical writings and individual poems, this book makes a strong case for his artistic worth. A definitive introduction to Shelley, useful for both scholars and newcomers, this book will be interest to students of literature.