This volume traces how American literature evolved in response to widespread conflicts over the very nature of US democracy in the early republic and antebellum eras. It examines how American writers reacted to three moments of profound divisiveness in the 1790s, 1830s, and 1850s.

Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements sparked Romanticism's rise and eventual flourishing as US writers increasingly embraced Romantic literary modes emphasizing the imagination's capacity for creative synthesis and the role it plays in shoring up the habits of mind and feeling that are vital to a meaningful democratic culture. It offers revisionary readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how these Romantic writers were preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their deepest convictions and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

Latin American History through its Art and Literature uses 2,000 years of Latin American history as the organizing theme, and then explores that history through the words of the writer, the brush of the painter, the pen of the cartoonist, and the lens of the photographer. Child includes the Latin (Spanish/Portuguese), the African, and the indigenous cultural heritages, and shows how these strands have combined to produce a unique Latin American culture with numerous national and regional variants. The book stresses an interdisciplinary approach to Latin America and also focuses on the way the region has related to the United States. Numerous visuals are included to illustrate these concepts.

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".

The two centuries after 1800 witnessed a series of sweeping changes in the way in which Britain was governed, the duties of the state, and its role in the wider world. Powerful processes - from the development of democracy, the changing nature of the social contract, war, and economic dislocation - have challenged, and at times threatened to overwhelm, both governors and governed. Such shifts have also presented challenges to the historians who have researched and written about Britain's past politics. This Handbook shows the ways in which political historians have responded to these challenges, providing a snapshot of a field which has long been at the forefront of conceptual and methodological innovation within historical studies. It comprises thirty-three thematic essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field. Collectively, these essays assess and rethink the nature of modern British political history itself and suggest avenues and questions for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History thus provides a unique resource for those who wish to understand Britain's political past and a thought-provoking 'long view' for those interested in current political challenges.

Michael Freeden explores the concept of liberalism, one of the longest-standing and central political theories and ideologies. Combining a variety of approaches, he distinguishes between liberalism as a political movement, as a system of ideas, and as a series of ethical and philosophical principles.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Wuppertal (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: Washington Irving was one of the "first notable fiction writers of the American romantic movement" (Keenan 970). His sketch book with tales such as "Rip Van Winkle" "made Irving the first American author to attain an international reputation" (Fender 165). Whereas Irving's prior work, the History of New York (1809) is written in a neoclassical1 tone right in the sense the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, "The Sketch Book [...], showed that Irving had gradually become a romanticist" (cf. Callow and Reilly 76). According to the "Oxford Companion to American Literature", Romanticism is a "term that is associated with imagination and boundlessness" (Hart 724). Furthermore, it was a movement that "elevated the individual, the passions, and the inner life. Romanticism, a reaction against neoclassicism, stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness in art forms, and rebellion against social conventions"2. The goal of this paper is to examine and explain the major romantic elements in Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle". Therefore, at first the developments and ways of thinking during the Romantic period will be described, and briefly contrasted with those of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. Then some information will be given on Irving as a romantic writer and the background of the tale of "Rip Van Winkle". After that several romantic features will be highlighted within short analyses of parts of the tale. Due to the briefness of the paper, the discussed features are restricted to themes such as "Truth", "Individualism" and the depiction of Rip Van Winkle as a common man, as well as the function of nature within the story.