Romanticism was a reaction against the Neoclassicism that invaded the nineteenth century, and marked a veritable intellectual rupture. Found in the writings of Victor Hugo and Lord Byron among others, its ideas are expressed in painting by Eugène Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich and William Blake. In sculpture, François Rude indicated the direction this new artistic freedom would take, endowing his work with a movement and expression never previously seen. By retracing the different stages of its evolution, this book offers a study of the different aspects of the Romantic movement.
Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war.
English Romanticism has long been considered an 'undramatic' and 'anti-theatrical' age, yet Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats all wrote plays and viewed them as central to England's poetic and political reform. In the Theatre of Romanticism analyses these plays, in the context of London theatre at the time, and argues that Romantic discourse on theatre is crucial to constructions of nationhood in the period.
The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism.
Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods
Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period
Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years
An engaging, full-color illustrated guide to the romantic and transcendentalist era in American literature, this updated volume provides important information on the foundations of romantic thought, romanticism and the new nation, gothic romance and sentimentalism, transcendentalism, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and romanticism and poetic voice.
