Drawing from the works of influential figures in art and literature, the author traces the development of romanticism from classicism and the emergence of the modern ego.

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

During the period of European revolutions the British Romantic theatre found itself reexaming the whole cast of social and sexual relations. The five plays grouped here represent some of the most radical and unusual examples of Romantic drama: Horace Walpole invented gothic melodrama with hisincest tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768), and Robert Southey imagined the theatre as a site of revolutionary protest in Wat Tyler (1794). Joanna Baillie's psychological case study in aristocratic hatred, De Monfort (1768) was thought too alarming to have been written by a woman, while ElizabethInchbald's hugely successful Lovers' Vows (1798) was sufficiently subversive for Jane Austen to analyse some of its illicit potential in Mansfield Park (1814). Byron's strenuous tragedy The Two Foscari (1821) explores an inescapable conflict between parental love and political authority. The stageimagined by these writers is an arena of tense and embattled desires, with sexual and political claims mapped onto the same conflicts of power. This exciting edition is the only one of its kind and provides the first authorized texts of the plays complete with fully-researched reference to majorauthorial revision.

The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain. Brown here identifies areas in which musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers, and seeks to look beyond the notation to understand how composers might have expected to hear their music realized in performance. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that, in many respects, the sound worlds in which Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms created their music were more radically different from ours than is generally assumed.

Easy Classics to Moderns Compiled and Edited by Denes Agay These 142 pieces by the masters of piano literature date from the second half of the 17th century to the present day.