The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism studies texts written by contemporary poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, philosophers, phrenologists, sociologists, gossip-mongers and anonymous correspondents.

Reconstructs Reid's career as a mathematician and natural philosopher for the first time.

In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.

Reflections on the Bicentenary of the 1819 Massacre of Reformers in Manchester Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence. Contributors explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of people to participate in government were reflected and revised in the verbal and visual culture of the time. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force.Key FeaturesProvides a multi-perspectival, historical revaluation of the violence of Peterloo Draws on contemporary theorizations of violence by Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Rob Nixon to account for the cultural factors leading to PeterlooSupplements treatments of Peterloo centering on English history with attention to the significance of that event from Scottish, Irish and North American perspectives

This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

This dissertation studies how late romantic British authors, writing primarily in the 1820s and 1830s, renegotiate inherited models of "character" from their high romantic predecessors. The authors in this dissertation all fear that having an identity means moral and intellectual stagnation. To have an essence is to be constituted. But at the same time, a self that is entirely conditional and arbitrary is also a source of anxiety. As a result, their texts linger in a sort of epistemological middle ground: a safe and experimental space wherein the discomforts inherent in each philosophical alternative- the self as transhistorical organism and the self as nonessential construct- can be avoided. Percy Shelley writes a poem, Alastor (1816), whose speaking "I." is meant to represent what he calls the "one mind," a sort of transindividual consciousness of which all individual minds are said to be the "marks" or "modifications." William Hazlitt associates the soul with an internal bias fixed at birth and visible in the human body, but not necessarily (á la Plato, Wordsworth and Coleridge) with an immaterial substance fixed in eternity. Letitia Landon creates picturesque characters who confuse and even synonymize surface and depth; her texts capitalize on the contradictions inherent in both personal and fictional subjectivities. Mary Shelley is Blakean and Hegelian in her insistence that a person without psychological contraries makes no moral and spiritual progress. All these authors thrive on the psychological climate or "mood" wherein their texts emerge, one marked by the systematic fragmentation of identity, the incipient dissolution of the idea of character. Their "aesthetic... insist[s] on the difficulty of recognizing... nondemonstrable identities."

British Romanticism and Prison Reform is the first full-length study to explore and define the close relationship between British Romantic literary texts, on the one hand, and the birth of the modern prison, on the other, giving long overdue attention to the revolution in punishment coterminous with the age we call Romantic.

The idea of character that many of us still take for granted - whether considered in print as an object of representation, or in life as a congenital 'bias' or an acquirable moral possession - is the shared concern of a multidisciplinary debate in reform-era Britain. This book argues for the independent merits of several lesser-known works written in England and Scotland during the 1820s and 1830s, recovering in these works a sustained ideological engagement with the ever-slippery concept of character. The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism studies texts written by contemporary poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, philosophers, phrenologists, sociologists, gossip-mongers and anonymous correspondents. Its main authors of interest include David Hume, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Letitia Landon, Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. With a fresh, interdisciplinary approach, this original intervention in Romantic-era scholarship throws character into relief as an especially problematic concept, not only for the poststructuralist critics who study late Romantic writers, but also for the writers themselves. It changes the ways in which literary scholarship has thought about the development of character discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century.