This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.

This book argues for the importance of disability to authors of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. By examining texts in a variety of genres — ranging from self-experimental medical texts to lyric poetry to metaphysical essays — Stanback demonstrates the extent to which non-normative embodiment was central to Romantic-era thought and Romantic-era aesthetics. The book reassesses well-known literary and medical works by such authors as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Humphry Davy, argues for the importance of lesser-studied work by authors including Charles Lamb and Thomas Beddoes, and introduces significant unpublished work by Tom Wedgwood.

Bringing together studies in theater history, print culture, and literature, this book offers a new consideration of Romantic-period writing in Britain. Recovering a wide range of theatrical criticism from newspapers and periodicals, some of it overlooked since its original publication in Regency London, Jonathan Mulrooney explores new contexts for the work of the actor Edmund Kean, essayist William Hazlitt, and poet John Keats. Kean's ongoing presence as a figure in the theatrical news presented readers with a provocative re-imagining of personal subjectivity and a reworking of the British theatrical tradition. Hazlitt and Keats, in turn, imagined the essayist and the poet along similar theatrical lines, reframing Romantic prose and poetics. Taken together, these case studies illustrate not only theater's significance to early nineteenth-century Londoners, but also the importance of theater's textual legacies for our own re-assessment of 'Romanticism' as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History yet effected real change? With a new preface by Griselda Pollock, this edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History. Parker and Pollock's critique of Art History's sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists' translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today. In March 2020 Griselda Pollock was awarded the Holberg Prize in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and her influence on thinking on gender, ideology, art and visual culture worldwide for over 40 years. Old Mistresses was her first major scholarly publication which has become a classic work of feminist art history.

Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive. During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities. Drawing from primary sources in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, Scott K. Taylor shows that these substances embodied Europeans' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade. Through the writings of physicians, theologians, political pamphleteers, satirists, and others, Ambivalent Pleasures tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that consuming them would make users more foreign); and the new forms of sociability that coalesced around their use. Even as Europeans' moral concerns about the consumption of these drugs fluctuated, the physical and sensory experiences of using them remained a critical concern, anticipating present-day rhetoric and policy about addiction to drugs and alcohol.