Exploring the significance of animals in Romantic-period writing, this new study shows how in this period they were seen as both newly different from humankind (subjects in their own right, rather than simply humanity's tools or adjuncts) and also as newly similar, with the ability to feel and perhaps to think like human beings. Approaches to animals are reviewed in a wide range of the period's literary work (in particular, that of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Southey, Clare and Blake). Poetry and other literary work are discussed in relation to discourses about animals in various contemporary cultural contexts, including children's books, parliamentary debates, vegetarian theses, encyclopaedias and early theories about evolution. The study introduces animals to the discussions about ecocriticism and environmentalism in Romantic-period writing by complicating the concept of 'Nature', and it also contributes to the debates about politics and the body in this period. It demonstrates the rich variety of thinking about animals in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and it challenges the exclusion of literary writing from some recent multi-disciplinary debates about animals, by exploring the literary roots of many metaphors about and attitudes to animals in our current thinking. Kindred Brutes constitutes a genuinely original and substantial contribution both to Romantic-period writing and to general debates about animals and the body.

Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with images of dead and deadly animals, as Chase Pielak observes in his study of animal encounters in the works of Charles and Mary Lamb, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. These encounters, Pielak suggests, coincide with anxieties over living alongside both animals and cemeteries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Pielak traces the linguistic, physical, and psychological interruptions occasioned by animal encounters from the heart of communal life, the table, to the countryside, and finally into and beyond the wild cemetery. He argues that Romantic period writers use language that ultimately betrays itself in beastly disruptions exposing anxiety over what it means to be human, what happens at death, the consequences of living together, and the significance of being remembered. Extending his discussion past an emphasis on animal rights to an examination of animals in their social context, Pielak shows that these animal representations are both inherently important and a foreshadowing of the ways we continue to need images of dead and deadly Romantic beasts.

In England in the second half of the eighteenth century an unprecedented amount of writing urged kindness to animals. This theme was carried in many genres, from sermons to encyclopedias, from scientific works to literature for children, and in the poetry of Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare and others. Romanticism and Animal Rights discusses the arguments writers used, and the particular meanings of these arguments in a social and economic context so different from the present. After introductory chapters, the material is divided according to specific practices that particularly influenced feeling or aroused protest: pet keeping, hunting, baiting, working animals, eating them, and the various harms inflicted on wild birds. The book shows how extensively English Romantic writing took up issues of what we now call animal rights. In this respect it joins the growing number of studies that seek precedents or affinities in English Romanticism for our own ecological concerns.

Robert Burns and Pastoral is a full-scale reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759-1796), arguably the most original poet writing in the British Isles between Pope and Blake, and the creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. Although still celebrated as Scotland's national poet, Burns has long been marginalised in English literary studies worldwide, due to a mistaken view that his poetry is linguistically incomprehensible and of interest to Scottish readers only. Nigel Leask challenges this view by interpreting Burns's poetry as an innovative and critical engagement with the experience of rural modernity, namely to the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thereby resituating it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. Detailed study of the literary, social, and historical contexts of Burns's poetry explodes the myth of the 'Heaven-taught ploughman', revealing his poetic artfulness and critical acumen as a social observer, as well as his significance as a Romantic precursor. Leask discusses Burns's radical decision to write 'Scots pastoral' (rather than English georgic) poetry in the tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, focusing on themes of Scottish and British identity, agricultural improvement, poetic self-fashioning, language, politics, religion, patronage, poverty, antiquarianism, and the animal world. The book offers fresh interpretations of all Burns's major poems and some of the songs, the first to do so since Thomas Crawford's landmark study of 1960. It concludes with a new assessment of his importance for British Romanticism and to a 'Four Nations' understanding of Scottish literature and culture.

Beginning with the premise that men and women of the Romantic period were lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, Fellow Romantics offers an inspired counterpoint to studies of Romantic-era women writers that stress their differences from their male contemporaries. As they advance the work of scholars who have questioned binary approaches to studying male and female writers, the contributors variously link, among others, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and the male Romantic poets. These pairings invite us to see anew the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer's art. Here we see writers of both sexes interacting in their shared historical moment, while the contributors reorient our attention toward common points of engagement between male and female authors. What is gained is a more textured understanding of the period that will serve as a model for future studies.

'It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object - the very poetry of politics. Only think - a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.' So wrote Lord Byron in his journal, in February 1821, only days before the outbreak of revolution in Greece, where three years later he would die in the service of the revolutionary cause. For a poet whose life and work are interlaced with action of multiple sorts, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Byron's engagement with issues of politics. This volume brings together the work of eminent Byronists from seven European countries and the USA to re-assess the evidence. What did Byron mean by the 'poetry of politics'? Was he, in any sense, a 'political animal'? Can his final, fateful involvement in Greece be understood as the culmination of earlier, more deeply rooted quests? The first part of the book examines the implications of reading and writing as themselves political acts; the second interrogates the politics inherent or implied in Byron's poems and plays; the third follows the trajectory of his political engagement (or non-engagement), from his abortive early career in the British House of Lords, via the Peninsular War in Spain to his involvement in revolutionary politics abroad.

Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.