This innovative and ground-breaking study explores the complex relationship between linguistic theory and literature during the Romantic period, focusing particularly on William Hazlitt's writings about linguistic theory and also considering figures such as Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.

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.

This volume contains a peer reviewed selection of invited contributions, papers and posters that were presented at the 2018 venue of Going Romance (XXXII) in Utrecht (a four day program that included two thematic workshops). The papers all discuss data and formalized analyses of one or more Romance languages or dialects, in either synchronic or diachronic perspective, and pay particular attention to the variation and the actual variability that is at stake, not only in syntax and morpho-syntax but also in semantics and phonology. Beyond the discussion of differences between languages and/or dialects from a formalist perspective, the volume also contains a number of papers linking the theme of variation to sociolinguistic issues such as natural bilingualism and micro-contact.

"The Romantic Performative" develops a new context and methodology for reading Romantic literature by exploring philosophies of language from the period 1785-1835. It reveals that the concept of the performative, debated by twentieth-century theorists from J. L. Austin to Judith Butler, has a much greater relevance for Romantic literature than has been realized, since Romantic philosophy of language was dominated by the idea that something "happens" when words are spoken. By presenting Romantic philosophy as a theory of the performative, and Romantic literature in terms of that theory, this book uncovers the historical roots of twentieth-century ideas about speech acts and performativity. Romantic linguistic philosophy already focused on the relationship between speaker and hearer, describing speech as an act that establishes both subjectivity and intersubjective relations and theorizing reality as a verbal construct. But Romantic theorists considered utterance, the context of utterance, and the positions and identities of speaker and hearer to be much more fluid and less stable than modern analytic philosophers tend to make them. Romantic theories of language therefore yield a definition of the "Romantic performative" as an utterance that creates an object in the world, instantiates the relationship between speaker and hearer, and even founds the subjectivity of the speaker in the moment when the utterance occurs. The author traces the Romantic performative through its diverse development in the moral, political, and legal philosophy of Reid, Bentham, Kant and the German Idealists, Humboldt, and Coleridge, then explores its significance in literary texts by Coleridge, Godwin, Holderlin, and Kleist. These readings demonstrate that Romantic writers mounted a deeper investigation than previously realized into the way the act of speaking generates subjective identity, intersubjective relations, and even objective reality. The project of the book is to read the language of Romanticism as performative and to recognize among its achievements the historical founding of the discourse of performativity itself.

This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 32nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, dealing with linguistic theory as applied to the Romance languages, and on empirical studies on the acquisition of Romance, with studies on Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch and Latin. The theoretical section contains contributions concentrating on specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface, on morphosyntactic issues, on subject licensing and case, and on phonology. The acquisition section includes contributions on first, bilingual and second language acquisition of functional structure, word structure, quantification and stress.

Endymion is the trâit d'union between Keats’s juvenilia and his better known, and conventionally more mature, works. By its nature, it is a transitional work, and thus gives the scholar special insight into the development of Keats’s poetics and idiom. Moreover, Endymion is the Keatsian work which most rattled and provoked critics of its time. This book reconstructs the linguistic context of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in order to explain the reviewers’ unease with regard to Endymion. It shows that eighteenth-century prescriptivism arose from a deep-seated anxiety of language, Lockean in origin, and that the ensuing desire to stabilize and therefore control language informed Romantic criticism in general, and the criticism of Keats’s work in particular, more fundamentally than politics could or did. The imaginative and linguistic markers of Endymion are mapped and analysed in order to prove that Keats produced a “poetics of uncontrollability”, a series of textual and stylistic strategies, which violated linguistic and narrative standards, and which were, therefore, perceived as unsettling.

The Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement's coherence in contract theory's definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century.

"This book is the first authoritative analysis of the theory of translation in German Romanticism. In a systematic study of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Hölderlin, Berman demonstrates the importance of the theory of translation for an understanding of German romantic culture, arguing that never before has the concept of translation been meditated in such detail and such depth. Indeed, fundamental questions that arise again today, such as the question concerning the proper versus the literal, of the Other to a given culture, the essence of the work of art, and of language, all these issues, and many more, are shown to have been premeditated in a most important manner by these German Romantics.

Early German Romanticism has long been acknowledged as a major literary movement, but only recently have scholars appreciated its philosophical significance as well. This collection of original essays showcases not only the philosophical achievements of early German Romantic writers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, but also the sophistication, contemporary relevance, and wide-ranging influence of their philosophical contributions. This volume will be of interest both to students looking for an introduction to romanticism as well as to scholars seeking to discover new facets of the movement – a romantic perspective on topics ranging from mathematics to mythology, from nature to literature and language. This volume bears testimony to the enduring and persistent modernity of early German Romantic philosophy.

Explores the relevance of hermeneutics for modern human sciences, its history and development, and its key philosophical debates.