First published in 1963. Matthew Arnold grew up under the personal as well as literary influence of Wordsworth, when Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dominant poetic forces and Coleridge a seminal thinker on social and religious problems. However, the great Romantics were not always positive influences. This study attempts to provide an examination of Arnold by exploring and evaluating the full range of Arnold’s reactions to the major Romantic poets over his whole career. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

The very word "culture" has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea’s beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea’s development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of cultures understood to stand apart from the whole; yet, Baker writes, the sea also stands in their poetry of culture as a reminder of the broader sphere of circulation in which the poet's work, if not the poet's subject, inheres. Although other books treat the history of the idea of culture, none synthesizes that history with the literary history of maritime empire. Written on the Water tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and culturalist rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians. In so doing, it analyzes Wordsworth's pronounced ambivalence toward the sea, Coleridge's sojourn as an imperial functionary in Malta, Byron's cosmopolitan seafaring tales, and Arnold's dual identity as "poet of water" and prose arbiter of "culture." It also considers Romanticism's classical inheritance, arguing that the Lake Poets dissolved into the idea of culture the Virgilian system of pastoral, georgic, and epic modes of literature and life. This compelling new study will engage any reader interested in the intellectual and literary history of Britain and the lived experience of British Romanticism.

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.

Examines the critical reputation of one of the great literary critics. From the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems in 1849, Matthew Arnold has been a figure of controversy who sparked decidedly strong and divergent opinions -- both about the quality of his artistry and about the ideas he espoused. Not surprisingly, a chronological reading of books and articles focusing on Arnold's writings reveals a century-long civil war among literary scholars. Focusing on studies judged to be most influential in shaping critical opinion of Arnold's poetry and prose, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy explores the interplay between individual critics and Arnold's works, and between one critic and another as they respond to Arnold's writings and the critical commentary. There emerges an appreciation for the key questions that have captured the attention of Arnold's critics for over a hundred years: Was Arnold a first-rate poet, or does he rank below the greatest figures of his century, notably Tennyson and Browning?

This set reissues 28 books on Romanticism originally published between 1940 and 2006. Routledge Library Editions: Romanticism provides an outstanding collection of scholarship which explores not only Romantic literature but the Romantic Movement as a whole, including art, philosophy and science.