Through close readings of diverse examples by Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Irving and Poe, this book argues that the familiar essay in the Romantic period embodies a quintessentially metropolitan mode of affect. The generic traits of the essay—astuteness of observation, an ambulatory or paratactic movement of thought, and an urbane tone of wry or ironic humour—all predispose it to the expression of a detached, non-pathological state of mind. This is a mind conditioned by the quickened pace, assorted humanity, and plenitude of spectacle which characterise urban and urbanised life. In making a valuable, genre-based contribution to scholarship on the importance to Romantic studies of the city and metropolitan culture, the traditional concept of Romantic affect is reassessed. The book proposes a more complex and varied model than the simple binary one of a “feeling” reaction to Enlightenment “reason.” Partly enacted within its own formal parameters and partly through its disruptive and genre-transcending progeny, the essayistic figure, the familiar essay articulates a blithe and, at times, shocking and provocative discourse of “un-affect,” or a strategically and often satirical callousness. Therefore, the overall concept of affect in this period needs to be understood not as a unified entity opposed to Enlightenment reason, but a dialogue between concurrent, opposing modes, played out against a dichotomized geo-cultural landscape of the country and the city. Essayistic un-affect emerges, in the end, as an apolitical phenomenon, a primary vehicle for the essayist’s inherent scepticism, sometimes enabling outright ridicule and, at other times, a tentative questioning or probing of both orthodox thought and emerging ideas: from the rarefied liberalist sensibility of the Lake poets, to the hubristic vanity of the colonial adventurer, and from the allure of hedonistic, Old World decadence to the proscriptive strictures of moralistic art.

From its origin as the Roman city of Londinium through to its latest incarnation as a super-diverse World City in the twenty-first century, London's history and culture has been shaped by migration. This book expresses and celebrates the plurality of the capital's cultures and affirms the importance of migration in the making of the modern city through thirty-three short essays written by academics, artists, broadcasters and curators. Subjects range from the mediaeval to the contemporary: buildings and institutions, individuals and communities, objects, visual art, street performances and literary texts. Some contributors focus on famous people and places, like Shakespeare and St Paul's, while others explore less well-known subjects, like the Free German League of Culture (1939-46) or Ignatius Sancho, the eighteenth-century musician, grocer and man-of-letters. It is not only London's cultures which are diverse, migration is also plural. This book engages with the very many human migrations from across the globe and within the British Isles that have taken place over the last two-thousand years, as well as with the movements of plants, animals, and ideologies from other countries and continents, and the movement of natural resources and manmade toxins into and through the city. Composed of a vivid collection of snapshots, the volume offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the city and provides new insights into the successive migrant communities that have come to London and made it their own.

The Testimony of Sense attempts to answer a neglected but important question: what became of epistemology in the late eighteenth century, in the period between Hume's scepticism and Romantic idealism? It finds that two factors in particular reshaped the nature of 'empiricism': the socialisation of experience by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and the impact upon philosophical discourse of the belletrism of periodical culture. The book aims to correct the still widely-held assumption that Hume effectively silenced epistemological inquiry in Britain for over half a century. Instead, it argues that Hume encouraged the abandonment of subject-centred reason in favour of models of rationality based upon the performance of trusting actions within society. Of particular interest here is the way in which, after Hume, fundamental ideas like the self, truth, and meaning are conceived less in terms of introspection, correspondence, and reference, and more in terms of community, coherence, and communication. By tracing the idea of intersubjectivity through the issues of trust, testimony, virtue and language, the study offers new perspectives on the relationships between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism. As philosophy grew more conversational, the familiar essay became a powerful metaphor for new forms of communication. The book explores what is epistemologically at stake in the familiar essay genre as it develops through the writings of Joseph Addison, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. It also offers readings of philosophical texts, such as Hume's Treatise, Thomas Reid's Inquiry, and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, as literary performances.

Taking its cue from feminist-postcolonial studies of women’s writing in the colonial era, this book testifies to the great diversity of such writing. However, it uniquely does this by showing the existence of a richly varied and heterogeneous range of texts not only between man writers and woman writers, but, equally, amongst the women themselves. These are women, moreover, who are writing within the same relatively small region of South East Asia. As Agnes Keith, whose writing forms the focal point of this book, credibly surmises, Borneo remained, even towards the end of the colonial period, a dark and mysterious land to people in the West, largely populated, as they imagined, by tribes of headhunters. It was, therefore, to the lack of knowledge and curiosity of ordinary middle-class people in the West that Keith’s writing, and that of the other woman writers featured in this book, so engagingly responds.

An in-depth look into the life of Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and the legacy of his work A pioneer of urban Romanticism, essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) found inspiration in London’s markets, theaters, prostitutes, and bookshops. He prized the city’s literary scene, too, where he was a star wit. He counted among his admirers Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His friends valued in his conversation what distinguished his writing style: a highly original blend of irony, whimsy, and melancholy. Eric G. Wilson captures Lamb’s strange charm in this meticulously researched and engagingly written biography. He demonstrates how Lamb’s humor helped him cope with a life‑defining tragedy: in a fit of madness, his sister Mary murdered their mother. Arranging to care for her himself, Lamb saved her from the gallows. Delightful when sane, Mary became Charles’s muse, and she collaborated with him on children’s books. In exploring Mary’s presence in Charles’s darkly comical essays, Wilson also shows how Lamb reverberates in today’s experimental literature.

This collection renders an invigorating take into engaging ideas that traverse various literary issues. Each chapter opens our minds to the thrilling possibilities of approaching literary texts and paves the way for appreciating literature more widely. Although appearing divergent in nature, these chapters do encourage literary exploration and appreciation. Literature celebrates diversities and differences, and this book World Mosaics of Literary Analysis: Accepting Differences and Embracing Diversities admittedly urges its readers to accept differences and to embrace diversities. Undeniably there is strength in diversity.

The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine.

Opening a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world, this volume explores the role of affects and emotions such as shame, fascination and withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture.

A hefty one-volume reference addressing various facets of the essay. Entries are of five types: 1) considerations of different types of essay, e.g. moral, travel, autobiographical; 2) discussions of major national traditions; 3) biographical profiles of writers who have produced a significant body of work in the genre; 4) descriptions of periodicals important for their publication of essays; and 5) discussions of some especially significant single essays. Each entry includes citations for further reading and cross references. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats. Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture.