This collection of essays addresses the role of literature in radical politics. Topics covered include the legacy of Robert Burns, broadside literature in Munster and radical literature in Wales.

This collection of essays addresses the role of literature in radical politics. Topics covered include the legacy of Robert Burns, broadside literature in Munster and radical literature in Wales.

The main theme of this book is religion and identity - not only national identity, but also regional and local identities. David Hempton penetrates to the heart of vigorous religious and political cultures, both elite and popular, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He brings to life a diverse and variegated spectrum of religious communities in all of the British Isles. With so much new British history really an extended version of old English history, Hempton has devoted more attention to the Celtic fringes, especially Ireland. It is an exercise in comparative history, but he also shows how richly coloured is the religious history of these islands. He demonstrates that even in their cultural distinctiveness, the various religious traditions have had more in common than is sometimes imagined. The book arises from the 1993 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham.

This volume pays particular attention therefore to contextual factors; to the changing codes and conventions of political culture and public space. Through critical engagement with revisionist and post-modernist interpretations, it throws new light on factors which often divided liberals from radicals and, indeed, radicals themselves.

Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) In this volume of interdisciplinary essays, leading scholars examine the radical tradition in British literary culture from the English Revolution to the French Revolution. They chart continuities between the two periods and examine the recuperation of ideas and texts from the earlier period in the 1790s and beyond. Contributors utilize a variety of approaches and concepts: from gender studies, the cultural history of food and diet and the history of political discourse, to explorations of the theatre, philosophy and metaphysics. This volume argues that the radical agendas of the mid-seventeenth century, intended to change society fundamentally, did not disappear throughout the long eighteenth-century only to be resuscitated at its close. Rather, through close textual analysis, these essays indicate a more continuous transmission. Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: English literature 18th century History and criticism, Radicalism in literature, English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism, English literature 19th century History and criticism, Revolutionary literature, English History and criticism, Politics and literature Great Britain History, Radicalism Great Britain History.

Pamphleteering was a vital component of the popular political discussion opened up by the French Revolution of 1789, but while the English pamphlet wars have been exhaustively explored, Welsh pamphlet literature has been ignored. During the fifteen years following the French Revolution of 1789, over 100 Welsh pamphlets and sermons engaged in a public discourse which discussed the larger issues raised by the Revolution and the war against the French Republic. This pioneering volume seeks to capture the excitement of the period by demonstrating how radicals and loyalists, Dissenters, Methodists and Churchmen, pacifists and warmongers engaged in a lively argument in their published works. An in-depth essay reviews and interprets texts written by artisans, Dissenting ministers, country curates and Anglican bishops, who all used religion as politics; promoted war or peace; argued over republicanism and loyalism, and utilized the law as a stage for political ideas. All texts are fully translated and thus made accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

An edited collection examining the construction of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A major 2007 study of the impact of Home Rule on liberalism and popular radicalism in Britain and Ireland. Eugenio Biagini argues that between 1876 and 1906 the crisis of public conscience caused by the Home Rule debate acted as the main catalyst in the remaking of popular radicalism. This was not only because of Ireland's intrinsic importance but also because the 'Irish cause' came to be identified with democracy, constitutional freedoms and humanitarianism. The related politics of emotionalism did not aid in finding a solution to either the Home Rule or the Ulster problem but it did create a popular culture of human rights based on the conviction that, ultimately, politics should be guided by non-negotiable moral imperatives. Adopting a comparative perspective, this book explores the common ground between Irish and British democracy and makes a significant contribution to the history of human rights, imperialism and Victorian political culture.

This established study focuses on the most important phase of Irish migration, providing analysis of why and how the Irish settled in Britain in such numbers. Updated and expanded, the new edition now extends the coverage to 1939 and features new chapters on gender and the Irish diaspora in a global perspective.

Examines the evolving relationship between Church and State, the character of radical thought in Enlightenment England, and the nature of that Enlightenment itself. A tribute to the work of the late Justin Champion, this volume explores the radical religious and political ideas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England which were at the heart of Champion's intellectual contributions. Drawing on the debates and upheavals that dominated the period from the British Civil Wars to the mid-eighteenth century, the essays in this collection interrogate the challenging relationship between politics and religion which prompted what Champion called a 'Crisis of Christianity'. Diverse perspectives on that crisis are reconstructed, encompassing the experiences of republicans and radicals, philosophers and historians, atheists and clergymen. Through these individuals, a complex discourse which defies easy categorisation is recovered, but which speaks to central discussions concerning the evolving relationship between Church and State, the character of radical thought in Enlightenment England, and indeed the nature of that Enlightenment itself.