The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as Englishmen and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine, and the law, and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, he charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self.

Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland

During the Irish Famine of 1845-52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as a range of commentaries on the Irish disaster, argued for a new theory of individual expression in opposition to the systemized approach to economic life that political economy proposed. These romantic views of human subjectivity eventually provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.

This original study examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.

The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England

The coronation was, and still is, one of the most important ceremonies of an English monarch's reign. Alice Hunt's study assesses the impact of the Reformation on the period's coronation ceremonies, and examines how they were perceived and described by contemporary observers such as courtiers and playwrights.

This historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterised at times by antagonistic relations between writers or works.