Abstract
This is a book on the politics of English Romantic poetry. It is a well established field. Carl Woodring’s Politics in English Romantic Poetry gave in 1970 a commanding survey of the topic that was already able to draw on a large number of more specialized studies; Todd on Wordsworth’s politics, K. N. Cameron on Shelley’s, Erdman’s work on Blake and Byron.1 There has been much more since: an extraordinary outpouring of books on Wordsworth;2 Kelvin Everest and Nigel Leask on Coleridge; Malcolm Kelsall and Jerome Christensen on Byron; Dawson, and Scrivener on Shelley,3 and a more recent interest in Keats’s politics, initiated by Jerome McGann and developed by critics such as Daniel Watkins, Marjorie Levinson, and Nicholas Roe.4 There is little evidence that interest in this kind of approach to the literature of the period is slackening. In 1998 there were important contributions to the field by James Chandler, Kenneth Johnston and Clifford Siskin.5
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Notes
Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970)
F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: A Study of Wordsworth (Methuen, London, 1957)
David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of his Own Times (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1954)
K. N. Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (Gollancz, London, 1951).
Amongst which I would cite Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986)
David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imgaination: The Poetry of Displacement (Methuen, London, 1987)
Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge; The Radical Years (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988)
Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1989)
Richard Bourke, Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity (Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1993).
Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Harvester, Brighton, 1979)
Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Macmillan, London, 1988)
Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Harvester, Brighton, 1987)
Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993)
Paul Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980)
Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982).
See Jerome McGann’s 1979 article, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, reprinted in Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985)
Susan Wolfson, SiR, 25 (Summer 1986), pp. 171–229
Daniel P. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Associated University Presses, London and Toronto, 1989)
Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989)
Keats And History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995)
Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997).
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998)
Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (Norton, New York, 1998)
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1998).
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 17601830 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982).
Rethinking Historicism, ed. Marjorie Levinson (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), p. 4.
Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983).
Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1988).
David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1993), p. 62.
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© 2000 Richard Cronin
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Cronin, R. (2000). Introduction. In: The Politics of Romantic Poetry. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287051_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287051_1
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