This book is about the literary and friendship networks that were active in Britain for a 250 year period. Patterns in the nature of literary social circles emerge: they may centre upon a location, like Christ Church, or a person, like Aaron Hill; they may suffer stress when private relationships become public knowledge, as Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon shows; and they may model themselves on a preceding age, as the relationship between the Sidney circle and Lady Mary Wroth exemplifies. Despite these similarities, no two coteries are the same. The circles this volume examines even differ in their acceptance of their own status as a coterie: someone like Constance Fowler was certainly part of a strict familial coterie; the Scriberlians were a more informal set who were also members of other groups; and although Byron’s years of fame are regularly associated with Holland House, he often denied being of their party. With an Afterword by Helen Hackett

This collection of eleven essays positions Moore within a developing and expanding international readership during the course of the nineteenth century. In accounting for the successes he achieved and the challenges he faced, recurring themes include: Moore’s influence and reputation; modes of dissemination through networks and among communities; also, the articulation of personal, political, and national identities. This book, the product of an international team of scholars, is the first to focus explicitly on the reputations of Thomas Moore in different parts of the world, including Bombay, Dublin, Leipzig, and London, as well as America, Canada, Greece, and the Hispanic world. Through it, we will understand more about Moore’s reception, and also appreciate how the publication and dissemination of poetry and song in the romantic and Victorian eras operated in different parts of the world—in particular considering how artistic and political networks effected the transmission of cultural products.

This study examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the mid-seventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents. The study has two main focuses: the first, the particular social environments in which texts were compiled and, second, the presence within this system of a large body of (usually anonymous) rare or unique poems. Manuscripts from aristocratic, academic, and urban professional environments are examined in separate chapters that highlight particular collections. Two chapters consider the social networking within the university and London that facilitated the transmission within these environments and between them. Although the topic is addressed throughout the study, the place of rare or unique poems in manuscript collections is at the center of the final three chapters. The book as a whole argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the social life of texts in the period and to little-known or unknown rare or unique poems that represent a field of writing broader than that defined in a literary history based mainly on the products of print culture.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine? Sometimes called the fourth genre, the essay has been over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama, and has proved notoriously resistant to definition. On Essays reveals in the essay a pattern of paradox: at once a pedagogical tool and a refusal of the methodical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay. Neither a comprehensive history nor a student companion, On Essays is a series of seventeen elegantly written essays on authors and aspects in the history of the genre - essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.

Delve into the often-overlooked lives and legacies of everyday women in Tudor and Stuart England. Owing to their privilege and social stature, much is known about the elite women of 16th- and 17th-century England. Historians know far less, however, about the everyday women from the middle and lower classes from the 1550s to 1650 who left behind only scattered bits and pieces of their lives. Born into a narrow class and gender hierarchy that placed women second to men in almost all regards, women from the poor and middling ranks had limited social and economic opportunities beyond what men and the church afforded them. Yet, as Theresa D. Kemp shows in this addition to the Daily Life through History series, many of these women, most of them illiterate by modern standards, found creative ways to assert agency and push back against social norms. In an era when William Shakespeare debuted his plays at the Globe Theatre in London, everyday English women were active in religious movements, wrote literature, and went to court to protest abuse at home. Ultimately, a close examination of the lives of these women reveals how instrumental they were in shaping English society during a transformative and dynamic period of British history.