During the period of European revolutions the British Romantic theatre found itself reexaming the whole cast of social and sexual relations. The five plays grouped here represent some of the most radical and unusual examples of Romantic drama: Horace Walpole invented gothic melodrama with hisincest tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768), and Robert Southey imagined the theatre as a site of revolutionary protest in Wat Tyler (1794). Joanna Baillie's psychological case study in aristocratic hatred, De Monfort (1768) was thought too alarming to have been written by a woman, while ElizabethInchbald's hugely successful Lovers' Vows (1798) was sufficiently subversive for Jane Austen to analyse some of its illicit potential in Mansfield Park (1814). Byron's strenuous tragedy The Two Foscari (1821) explores an inescapable conflict between parental love and political authority. The stageimagined by these writers is an arena of tense and embattled desires, with sexual and political claims mapped onto the same conflicts of power. This exciting edition is the only one of its kind and provides the first authorized texts of the plays complete with fully-researched reference to majorauthorial revision.

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats. Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture.

This book argues that Gothic writing of the Romantic period is queer. Using a variety of texts, it argues that contemporary queer theory can help us to read the obliqueness and invisibility of same-sex desire in a culture of vigilance. Fincher shows how the Gothic's ambivalent gender politics destabilize heteronormative narratives.

Social Reform in Gothic Writing provides a transatlantic view of the politically transformative power that Gothic texts effected during the Revolutionary era (1764-1834) through providing fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical writing in a wide variety of genres.

The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides an essential guide to theatre in Britain between the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 and the Reform Act of 1832 — a period of drama long neglected but now receiving significant scholarly attention. Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field, asking questions that will animate the study of drama in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for years to come. The Handbook gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms — not just tragedy and comedy, but the likes of melodrama and pantomime — as they developed and overlapped across the period, and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theatre production. It includes sections on historiography, the censorship and regulation of drama, theatre and the Romantic canon, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. In doing so, the Handbook shows the centrality of theatre to Georgian culture and politics, and paints a picture of a stage defined by generic fluidity and experimentation; by networks of performance that spread far beyond London; by professional women who played pivotal roles in every aspect of production; and by its complex mediation of contemporary attitudes of class, race, and gender.

Conclusion -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index

Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.

A Collier's Friday NightThe Widowing of Mrs HolroydThe Daughter-in-LawThe Fight for BarbaraTouch and GoOxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographiesilluminate the play's cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Anne Barton, Canbridge University

Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequently bridged the gap between British and European Romantic thought. This study sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations of comparable ambition. It argues that Coleridge found his philosophical adventures in the dominant idiom of his times exciting and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. Paul Hamilton situates major themes in Coleridge's prose and poetic writings in relation to his passion for German philosophy. He argues that Coleridge's infectious attachment to German (post-Kantian) philosophy was due to its symmetries with the structure of his Christian belief. Coleridge is read as an excited and winning expositor of this philosophy's power to articulate an absolute grounding of reality. Its comprehensiveness, however, rendered redundant further theological description, undermining the faith it had seemed to support. Thus arose Coleridge's anxious disguising of his German plagiarisms, aspersions cast on German originality, and his claims to have already experienced their insights within his own religious sensibility or in the writings of Anglican divines and neo-Platonists. This book recovers the extent to which his ideas call to be expanded within German philosophical debate.

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin’s political project.