This book provides new period-appropriate concepts for understanding Romantic-era physical disability through function and aesthetics.

The modern concept of disability did not exist in the Romantic period. This study addresses the anachronistic use of 'disability' in scholarship of the Romantic era, providing a disability studies theorized account that explores the relationship between ideas of function and aesthetics. Unpacking the politics of ability, the book reveals the centrality of capacity and weakness concepts to the egalitarian politics of the 1790s, and the importance of desert theory to debates about sentiment and the charitable relief of impaired soldiers. Clarifying the aesthetics of deformity as distinct from discussions of ability, Joshua uncovers a controversy over the use of deformity in picturesque aesthetics, offers accounts of deformity that anticipate recent disability studies theory, and discusses deformity and monstrosity as a blended category in Frankenstein. Setting aside the modern concept of disability, Joshua cogently argues for the historical and critical value of period-specific terms.

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This new edition of The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism has been fully revised and updated and includes two wholly new essays, one on recent developments in the field, and one on the rapidly expanding publishing industry of this period. It also features a comprehensive chronology and a fully up-to-date guide to further reading. For the past decade and more the Companion has been a much-admired and widely-used account of the phenomenon of British Romanticism that has inspired students to look at Romantic literature from a variety of critical angles and approaches. In this new incarnation, the volume will continue to be a standard guide for students of Romantic literature and its contexts.

Important revisions to the history of advertising and its connection to Romantic-era literature. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism investigates the entwined histories of the advertising industry and the gradual commodification of literature over the course of the Romantic Century (1750–1850). In this engaging and detailed study, Nicholas Mason argues that the seemingly antagonistic arenas of marketing and literature share a common genealogy and, in many instances, even a symbiotic relationship. Drawing from archival materials such as publishers' account books, merchants' trade cards, and authors' letters, Mason traces the beginnings of many familiar modern advertising methods—including product placement, limited-time offers, and journalistic puffery—to the British book trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until now, Romantic scholars have not fully recognized advertising’s cultural significance or the importance of this period in the origins of modern advertising. Mason explores Lord Byron’s appropriation of branding, Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s experiments in visual marketing, and late-Romantic debates over advertising's claim to be a new branch of the literary arts. Mason uses the antics of Romantic-era advertising to illustrate the profound implications of commercial modernity, both in economic practices governing the book trade and, more broadly, in the development of the modern idea of literature.

A Brief Literary History of Disability is a convenient, lucid, and accessible entry point into the rapidly evolving conversation around disability in literary studies. The book follows a chronological structure and each chapter pairs a well-known literary text with a foundational disability theorist in order to develop a simultaneous understanding of literary history and disability theory. The book as a whole, and each chapter, addresses three key questions: Why do we even need a literary history of disability? What counts as the literature of disability? Should we even talk about a literary aesthetic of disability? This book is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to add some disability studies to their literature teaching in any period, and for any students approaching the study of literature and disability. It is also an efficient reference point for scholars looking to include disability studies approaches in their research.

Romantic-era literature offers a key message: surveillance, in all its forms, was experienced distinctly and differently by women than men. Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period examines how familiar and neglected texts internalise and interrogate the ways in which targeted, asymmetric, and often isolating surveillance made women increasingly and uncomfortably visible in a way that still resonates today. The book combines the insights of modern surveillance studies with Romantic scholarship. It provides readers with a new context in which to understand Romantic-period texts and looks critically at emerging paradigms of surveillance directed at marginal groups, as well as resistance to such monitoring. Works by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Joanna Baillie, as well as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, give a new perspective on the age that produced the Panopticon. This book is designed to appeal to a wide readership, and is aimed at students and scholars of surveillance, literature, Romanticism, and gender politics, as well as those interested in important strands of women’s experience not only for the additional layers they reveal about the Romantic era but also for their relevance to current debates around asymmetries of power within gendered surveillance.

The best way to learn about Romantic poetry is to plunge in and read a few Romantic poems. This book guides the new reader through this experience, focusing on canonical authors - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Blake and Shelley - whilst also including less familiar figures as well. Each chapter explains the history and development of a genre or sets out an important context for the poetry, with a wealth of practical examples. Michael Ferber emphasizes connections between poets as they responded to each other and to great literary, social and historical changes around them. A unique appendix resolves most difficulties new readers of works from this period might face: unfamiliar words, unusual word order, the subjunctive mood and meter. This enjoyable and stimulating book is an ideal introduction to some of the most powerful and pleasing poems in the English language, written in one of the greatest periods in English poetry.

Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.