The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Sep 4, 2008 - Literary Criticism
More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.
 

Selected pages

Contents

List of contributors
The companionable forms of Romantic
pantheon
Romantic poetry and antiquity
Romantic meter and form
Romantic poetry and the standardization of English
Thinking in verse
Romantic poetry and the romantic novel
Romanticism and
Romantic poetry sexuality gender
Poetry peripheries and empire
Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia
lyric
The medium of Romantic poetry
Romantic poets and contemporary poetry
Index

Common terms and phrases

Adorno aesthetic ancient Book Britain British Romanticism Byron Cambridge University Press canon Chatterton Christabel Clare classical Coleridge Coleridge’s contemporary critical culture edited eighteenth eighteenth­century epic essay gender genre Gothic Hazlitt Hemans Hemans’s human imagination James John John Clare John Keats Keats Keats’s kind language literary literature London Lyrical Ballads Mary Robinson medium meter metrical modern Moore’s motion narrative nineteenth century nostalgia novel Ossian Oxford University Press passion Percy Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Shelley poem poem’s poet’s poetess poetic Poetry and Prose poetry’s poets political popular Prelude Princeton progress published readers resistance Revolution rhyme Robert Robert Southey Robinson Romantic period Romantic poetry Romanticism Samuel Taylor Coleridge Scott Scottish Seamus Heaney sense sentimental sexual Shelley Shelley’s social song sonnet Southey Southey’s standard English stanza suggest Thomas tradition verse vision volume William Blake William Hazlitt William Wordsworth words Wordsworthian writing York

About the author (2008)

James Chandler is Director of the Franke Institute of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Maureen N. McLane was educated at the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago. She is the author of Same Life: Poems (2008), Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge University Press, 2000; Paperback, 2006). A contributing editor at the Boston Review, she was for years the chief poetry critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her articles on poetry, contemporary fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared in many venues, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Poet, the Poetry Foundation website, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, the Chicago Review, and the Harvard Review. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and in 2007 she was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the NBCC. She has taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project, and is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at NYU. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, American Poet, The New Yorker, Slate, Canary, Circumference, A Public Space, American Letters and Commentary, The American Scholar, New American Writing, the Harvard Review, and Jacket. Her interests include contemporary poetry, British romanticism, balladry, historiography, psychoanalysis, anthropology, American studies and Scottish studies.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry
Cambridge Companions to Literature
AuthorMaureen N. McLane
EditorJames Chandler
PublisherCambridge University Press, 2008
ISBN1139827901, 9781139827904
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Literary Criticism / General
Literary Criticism / Poetry
Literary Criticism / Renaissance
Poetry / General
  
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