A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age

A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age explores the diverse issues and debates of the Romantic era, treating it both aesthetically and as a transformational historical epoch that ushered in Britain′s modern industrialized society. In a series of original, multi–disciplinary essays from scholarly experts, the text explores the full range of the Romantic period′s literary, visual, and non–fictional genres — from poetry, drama, and the novel, to periodical writing, literary criticism, painting and panoramas. These richly–varied, innovative contributions provide fresh new critical insights into the era′s religious controversy and politics, natural history and the "second scientific revolution", empire and nationalism, the relationship between Romanticism to modernist aesthetics, and more. Compelling and scholarly, A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age enhances our understanding of the Romantics′ imaginative and emotional responses to the conflicting forces of change that swept through Britain during this brief but crucially important literary and cultural era.

Notes on Contributors. List of Illustrations. Introduction: Jon Klancher (Carnegie Mellon University). 1. Transfiguring God: Religion, Revolution, Romanticism: Robert M. Maniquis (University of California, Los Angeles). 2. Romanticism and Empire: Saree Makdisi (UCLA). 3. “Associations Respect[ing] the Past”: Romantic and Enlightenment Historicisms: Anthony Jarrells (University of South Carolina). 4. Nationalisms in Britain and Ireland: Culture, Politics, and the Global: Miranda Burgess (University of British Columbia). 5. “With an Industry Incredible”: Politics, Writing, and the Public Sphere: Paul Keen (Carleton University). 6. Romantic Justice: Law, Literature, and Individuality: Mark Schoenfield (Vanderbilt University). 7. Natural History in the Romantic Period: Noah Heringman (University of Missouri–Columbia). 8. Romantic Sciences: British and Continental Thresholds: Frederick Burwick (UCLA). 9. Consumer Culture: Getting and Spending in Romantic Britain: Nicholas Mason (Brigham Young University). 10. The Romantic–Era Book Trade: Lee Erickson (Marshall University). 11. Visual Pleasures, Visionary States: Art, Entertainment, and the Nation: Gillen D’Arcy Wood (University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign). 12. Kantian Aesthetics, Romantic & Modern Poetics, and Sociopolitical Commitment: Robert Kaufman (University of California, Berkeley). Index

Jon Klancher teaches Romantic and Victorian literature, the sociology of culture, and the history of books and reading at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written widely on Romantic and nineteenth–century British literary and cultural history in such journals and collections as ELH , Studies in Romanticism , MLQ , Romantic Metropolis , The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , The New Historicism , and The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1837 . Author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987), he is currently completing a book, Transfiguring “Arts & Sciences”: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age .

"Though unusually well (and often quotably) written for collections of this type, the volume is best suited to specialists, who will find plenty of usable nuggets here." ( CHOICE , 2009)