This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period. But what was the true nature of imaginative engagement with British India? This study explores how a range of authors, from Edmund Burke and Sir William Jones to Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, sought to come to terms with India's strangeness and distance from Britain.

Through a close analysis of the pamphlets, reviews, lectures, journalism, editorials, poems, and novels surrounding the introduction of the gold standard in 1816, this book examines the significance of monetary policy and economic debate to the culture and literature of Britain during the age of Romanticism.

This book explores how British Romantic poetry--the writing, reading, and critical reception of it--reinforced British nationalism in the 19th century, ripening the political processes of nationhood that began with the first Act of Union in 1707. Using archival research on literary collections, criticism and reviews, this study documents the rise of bardic criticism in the 18th century, a style of literary criticism that reinvented the vernacular poet as a national bard and established a national role for poetry. Within this context, this book offers a new reading of major works by Romantic poets from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Felicia Hemans and Anna Letitia Barbauld, illuminating the ways they corroborated the public image of poets as bona fide national bards and advanced British nationalism, even when they intentionally set out to oppose or reform the politics of state.

The 18 chapters in this book outline conceptual approaches to the field and provide practical resources for teaching, ranging from ideas for individual class sessions to full syllabi and curricular frameworks.

Disputed Titles: Ireland, Scotland, and the Novel of Inheritance, 1798-1832 argues for the centrality of inheritance—often impeded, disrupted inheritance—to the novel’s rise to preeminence in Britain during the Romantic period. Novels by Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, and John Galt are densely populated by orphans, changelings, and lost and kidnapped heirs, and privilege a romance plot of dispossession that undermines the illusion of continuity implicit in the very concept of legacy. Through narratives of illegitimate ownership and other similar genealogical aberrations, authors from Britain’s “peripheries” interrogate their equivocal places in the uneasy compound of “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” Moving between the local and global manifestations of inheritance, their novels imagine history as contested property in order to explore vital issues of historic transition and political legitimacy, issues of immense consequence in the revolutionary climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.