The English Della Cruscan School, although its nucleus was formed in 1785 by the publication of The Florence Miscellany, existed neither in the consciousness of the group which formed it nor in that of the pu blic until it was so dubbed as a term of reproach by William Gifford in his bitter satire The Baviad (1791). As has already been mentioned Merry, the leader of the group, claimed to be a member of the Real Accademia Fiorentina which had swallowed up the Crusca and the two other Floren tine Academies in 1783; but it was not until the summer of 1787, when during his lingering voyage of return to England he began to send his contributions signed "Della Crusca" to the World, that the name became publicly known or even employed by his friends. Merry uses it of himself in a letter to Mrs. Piozzi after his arrival in England, on 27th February, 1788. 1 His public avowal of his romantic yearning after the suppressed Accademia della Crusca appears on the title-page of his Paulina (1787); for whereas on the title-page of Robert Manners (1785) he for the first time calls himself "A Member of the Royal Academy of Florence," the author of Paulina, "Robert Merry, Esq.

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic accomplishments. It offers a close examination of these women writers and their role in shaping the poetic culture of the fashionable newspaper. In doing so, this study offers the first account of the feminization of the fashionable newspaper and of popular literary culture in the final years of the eighteenth century.

Reveals the development of the idea of 'the people' through print and publicity in 1790s London. This title is also available as Open Access.

Revising traditional 'rise of the nation-state' narratives, this collection explores the development of and interactions among various forms of local, national, and transnational identities and affiliations during the long eighteenth century. By treating place as historically contingent and socially constructed, this volume examines how Britons experienced and related to a landscape altered by agricultural and industrial modernization, political and religious reform, migration, and the building of nascent overseas empires. In mapping the literary and cultural geographies of the long eighteenth century, the volume poses three challenges to common critical assumptions about the relationships among genre, place, and periodization. First, it questions the novel’s exclusive hold on the imagining of national communities by examining how poetry, drama, travel-writing, and various forms of prose fiction each negotiated the relationships between the local, national, and global in distinct ways. Second, it demonstrates how viewing the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century through a broadly conceived lens of place brings to the foreground authors typically considered 'minor' when seen through more traditional aesthetic, cultural, or theoretical optics. Finally, it contextualizes Romanticism’s long-standing associations with the local and the particular, suggesting that literary localism did not originate in the Romantic era, but instead emerged from previous literary and cultural explorations of space and place. Taken together, the essays work to displace the nation-state as a central category of literary and cultural analysis in eighteenth-century studies.

This thoroughly engaging and richly researched book presents a compelling portrait of Mary Robinson–darling of the London stage, mistress to the most powerful men in England, feminist thinker, and bestselling author, described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a woman of undoubted genius.” One of the most flamboyant free spirits of the late eighteenth century, Mary Robinson led a life that was marked by reversals of fortune. After being abandoned by her merchant father, who left England to establish a fishery among the Canadian Eskimos, Mary was married, at age fifteen, to Thomas Robinson. His dissipation landed the couple and their baby in debtors’ prison, where Mary wrote her first book of poetry, gaining her the patronage of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. On her release, Mary rose to become one of the London theater’s most alluring actresses, famously playing Perdita in The Winter’s Tale for a rapt audience that included the Prince of Wales, who fell madly in love with her. Never one to pass up an opportunity, she later used his ardent and numerous love letters as blackmail. After being struck down by paralysis, apparently following a miscarriage, she remade herself yet again, this time as a popular writer who was also admired by the leading intellectuals of the day. Filled with triumph and despair, and then triumph again, the amazing, multifaceted life of “Perdita” is marvelously captured in this stunning biography.

This remarkable study of the constructive and ultimately canon-forming relationship between satiric and Romantic modes of writing from 1760 to 1832 provides us with a new understanding of the historical development of Romanticism as a literary movement. Romantic poetry is conventionally seen as inward-turning, sentimental, sublime, and transcendent, whereas satire, with its public, profane, and topical rhetoric, is commonly cast in the role of generic other as the un-Romantic mode. This book argues instead that the two modes mutually defined each other and were subtly interwoven during the Romantic period. By rearranging reputations, changing aesthetic assumptions, and re-distributing cultural capital, the interaction of satiric and Romantic modes helped make possible the Victorian and modern construction of 'English Romanticism'.

In a series of representative case studies, Marianne Van Remoortel traces the development of the sonnet during intense moments of change and stability, continuity and conflict, from the early Romantic period to the end of the nineteenth century. Paying particular attention to the role of the popular press, which served as a venue of innovation and as a site of recruitment for aspiring authors, Van Remoortel redefines the scope of the genre, including the ways in which its development is intricately related to issues of gender. Among her subjects are the Della Cruscans and their primary critic William Gifford, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, George Meredith's Modern Love, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter. As women became a force to be reckoned with among the reading public and the writing community, the term 'sonnet' often operated as a satirical label that was not restricted to poetry adhering to the strict formalities of the genre. Van Remoortel's study, in its attentiveness to the sonnet's feminization during the late eighteenth century, offers important insights into the ways in which changing attitudes about gender and genre shaped critics' interpretations of the reception histories of nineteenth-century sonnet sequences.

The historical moment Forsyth's Italy -- Forsyth's prisons -- The 1813 and the 1816 versions of Forsyth's Italy -- Talking to Italians -- The hidden thoughts of Joseph Forsyth -- Visual arts, architecture, and literature -- The letters of the Forsyth brothers.

In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. In Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, David Simpson locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in a tradition that extends from antiquity to today. Simpson shows that debates about strangers loomed large in the French Republic of the 1790s, resulting in heated discourse that weighed who was to be welcomed and who was to be proscribed as dangerous. Placing this debate in the context of classical, biblical, and other later writings, he identifies a persistent difficulty in controlling the play between the despised and the desired. He examines the stranger as found in the works of Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and Southey, as well as in depictions of the betrayals of hospitality in the literature of slavery and exploration—as in Mungo Park's Travels and Stedman's Narrative—and portrayals of strange women in de Staël, Rousseau, and Burney. Contributing to a rich strain of thinking about the stranger that includes interventions by Ricoeur and Derrida, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger reveals the complex history of encounters with alien figures and our continued struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown.