This book examines how Coleridge staged his private woes in the public space of the newspaper. It looks at his publications in the Morning Post, which first published one of his most famous poems, Dejection. An Ode. It reveals how he found a socially sanctioned public outlet for poetic disappointments and personal frustrations which he could not possibly articulate in any other way. Featuring fresh, contextual readings of established major poems; original readings of epigrams, sentimental ballads, and translations; analyses of political and human-interest stories, this book reveals the remarkable extent to which Coleridge used the public medium of the newspaper to divulge his complex and ambivalent private emotions about his marriage, his relationship with the Wordsworths and the Hutchinsons, and the effect of these dynamics on his own poetry and poetics.

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays’ analysis of Coleridge’s poetry, following Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

This book considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s engagement with ‘Whig poetry’: a tradition of verse from the eighteenth century which celebrated the political and constitutional arrangements of Britain as guaranteeing liberty. It argues that, during the 1790s, Coleridge was able to articulate radical ideas under the cover of widely accepted principles through his references to this poetry. He positioned his poetry within a mainstream discourse, even as he favoured radical social change. Jacob Lloyd argues that the poets Mark Akenside, William Lisle Bowles, and William Cowper each provided Coleridge with a kind of Whig poetics to which he responded. When these references are understood, much of Coleridge’s work which seems purely personal or imaginative gains a political dimension. In addition, Lloyd reassess Coleridge’s relationship with Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, to provide an original, political reading of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. This book revises our understanding of the political and poetic development of a major poet and, in doing so, provides a new model for the origins of British Romanticism more broadly

Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection Fly-Catchers, while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a Quarry, and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his Philosophical Miscellany. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people. Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); real time entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.

In this book, I present and discuss a dialectical rethinking of the concept of Romanticism. The viewpoint on the concept has undergone a significant transformation since Jerome McGann first challenged the traditional definition of Romanticism. This perspective expands the framework of the concept by generating a forum for further study on the literary canon of Romanticism. Instead of defining the concept solely on the similarities of the romantic writers, this book aims to step beyond theoretical limitations and provide an approach to the study of cultural theory which creates a continuous and evergrowing synthesis of thought.

Pascoe adduces the theatrical posturing of the Della Cruscan poets, the staginess of the Marie Antoinette depicted in women's poetry, and the histrionic maneuverings of participants in the 1794 treason trials. Such public events as the trials also linked the newly powerful role of female theatrical spectator to that of political spectator. New forms of self-representation and dramatization arose as a result of that synthesis.

Focused on the Lake Poets’ prose writing—including their journalism and correspondence—this collection of essays challenges some widely held assumptions. Much of the narrative is Bristol-based, as the city’s reference library holds not only much of Southey’s personal library, but the borrowing registers of the old subscription library which still record the titles that Coleridge and Southey borrowed in the 1790s. It places the poets’ American Susquehanna project, customarily dismissed as the idealistic dreams of Oxbridge students, in the context of European emigration schemes prompted by the American Revolution. Similarly the label “Jacobin,” suggesting French revolutionary brutality, is shown here to be no more apt a description than “Communist” was in 1950s America. However, the book does show that the poets did challenge the government’s social and political assumptions of the day, often from a religious standpoint. The claim that the three poets abandoned democratic impulses when Napoleon invaded Switzerland is also here rebutted by their involvement—a decade later—in defending the independence of Spain and Portugal, not only against Bonaparte, but against their ancien-régime monarchies. When, in 1815, those monarchs were restored, Southey pinned his democratic hopes on the Portuguese colony of Brazil. At home, amid distress caused by wholesale demobilization and shrinkage of economically viable agricultural land, the poets understandably condemned the rabble-rousers and (correctly) predicted an assassination attempt. Coleridge and Southey, both youthful Unitarians and (like Wordsworth) devotees of the “religion of nature,” are argued here to have defended the Established Church against Catholic Emancipation, while the two brothers-in-law’s interest in Islam is shown to be more than mere obsessive Orientalism.

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic accomplishments. It offers a close examination of these women writers and their role in shaping the poetic culture of the fashionable newspaper. In doing so, this study offers the first account of the feminization of the fashionable newspaper and of popular literary culture in the final years of the eighteenth century.

Historical Narrative Offers Introduction to Romanticism by Placing Key Figures in Overall Social Context Going beyond the general literary survey, A History of Romantic Literature examines the literatures of sensibility and intensity as well as the aesthetic dimensions of horror and terror, sublimity and ecstasy, by providing a richly integrated account of shared themes, interests, innovations, rivalries and disputes among the writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing from the assemblage theory, Prof. Burwick maintains that the literature of the period is inseparable from prevailing economic conditions and ongoing political and religious turmoil, as well as developments in physics, astronomy, music and art. Thus, rather than deal with authors as if they worked in isolation from society, he identifies and describes their interactions with their communities and with one another, as well as their responses to current events. By connecting seemingly scattered and random events such as the bank crisis of 1825, he weaves the coincidental into a coherent narrative of the networking that informed the rise and progress of Romanticism. Notable features of the book include: A strong narrative structure divided into four major chronological periods: Revolution, 1789-1798; Napoleonic Wars, 1799-1815; Riots, 1815-1820; Reform, 1821-1832 Thorough coverage of major and minor figures and institutions of the Romantic movement (including Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Montague and the Bluestockings, Lord Byron, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon etc.) Emphasis on the influence of social networks among authors, such as informal dinners and teas, clubs, salons and more formal institutions With its extensive coverage and insightful analysis set within a lively historical narrative, History of Romantic Literature is highly recommended for courses on British Romanticism at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. It will also prove a highly useful reference for advanced scholars pursuing their own research.

A cultural-materialist assessment of the after-effects of the French Revolution on English culture, using Coleridge as a case study.