Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer a compelling new reading of British Romanticism. Matthew Ward reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics.

Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses the relationship between language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. Scientific, philosophical, and literary frameworks enable the author to develop an interdisciplinary approach to examining the role of plants in poetry. Drawing from recent plant science and contributing to the exciting new field of critical plant studies, the author develops a methodology he calls "botanical criticism" that aims to redress the lack of emphasis on plant life in studies of poetry. As a subset of ecocriticism, botanical criticism investigates how poets engage with plants literally and figuratively, materially and symbolically, in their works. Key themes covered in this volume include plants as invasives and weeds in human settings; as sources of physical and spiritual nourishment; as signifiers of region, home, and identity; as objects of aesthetics and objectivism; and, crucially, as beings with their own perspectives, voices, and modes of dialogue. Ryan demonstrates that poetic imagination is as essential as scientific rationality to elucidating and appreciating the mysteries of plant-being. This book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of interest to researchers in the emerging area of critical plant studies.

Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing. The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.

This book provides a lively exploration of the way in which several of the major British Romantic poets confront the writing and theorising of poetry. The question 'What is a poet?' is asked and answered with great frequency and variety; invariably there is an underlying sense of unease, often in the shadow, as it were, of Wordsworth's lines: We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness . The apparent confidence of the manifestoes is undermined by the self-doubts of much of the poetry, ranging from Coleridge to John Clare.

“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage,” William Hazlitt recalled, “He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.” Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know—and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.

There has long been a tendency to regard Thomas Hardy as a great tragic writer and to ignore or underestimate the value of his comic works. This derives no doubt partly from the fact that comedy as an art form has been consistently undervalued ever since Aristotle dealt with it so slightly and so slightingly. It also stems from the evident inability of some readers and critics to allow an artist a wide scope and multiple voices. Thomas Hardy and the Comic Muse discusses the nature of comedy and the various theories that purport to explain or define it, and examines Hardy’s works — novels, short stories, and poetry — in terms of the categories of farce, humour, satire, and wit. It looks at where and why Hardy made use of these forms of comedy, what his historical sources were, and why this side of his work has been so frequently neglected. It also looks at what insights might be offered by Hardy — both directly and indirectly — to answer the difficult but always tantalizing question: what is comedy? The two subjects, Hardy and Comedy, are counterpointed throughout so that they prove to be mutually illuminating.

This set reissues 7 books on the Romantic poet Lord Byron originally published between 1957 and 2005. The volumes examine Byron’s poetry, his poetic development, and his social and private life. Lord Byron’s epic satiric poem Don Juan is examined by some of the leading scholars of Romanticism.