Provides new theatrical contexts for Romantic-period literary writing, reframing the relationship between theater and poetry in Regency London.

Provides fresh perspectives on the Romantic era through a focus on the visual nature and impact of the stage

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of “Unity of Time” and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely followed the careers of star performers. Even when they did not directly know actors, they had what media theorists have dubbed "para-social interactions" with those stars, interacting with them through the mediation of mass communication, whether as audience members, newspaper and memoir readers, or consumers of prints, porcelain miniatures, and other manifestations of "fan" culture. This study takes an in-depth look at four pairs of performers and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These charismatic performers, knowingly or not, helped to guide the development of a character-based theatre—from the emotion-dominated plays made popular by Baillie to the pinnacle of Romantic drama under Shelley. They shepherded in a new style of writing that had verbal sophistication and engaged meaningfully with the moral issues of the day. They helped to create not just new modes of acting, but new ways of writing that could make use of their extraordinary talents.

Combating two centuries of sexism, this radical overview of Staël in context reveals a major player in Revolution and Romanticism.

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

This rich cultural history shows how honor, as much as freedom, inspired poets, novelists, and abolitionists of the nineteenth century.

This book illuminates the genesis and development of modern war writing in relation to Romanticism, biopolitics and disciplinary theory.

A provocative examination of how Romantic imaginings of the end of the world shaped thinking about politics and political change.