Romanticism was not only heterogeneous and disunited. It also had to face the hostile counter-movement of the Enlightenment and Augustan Neoclassicism, still going strong at the time of and in the decades following the French Revolution due to support from the ruling Establishment (the ancien regime of the Crown and Church of England). Neoclassicists regarded Romanticism as a heteretical amalgam of dissenting new schools, which threatened the monopoly of the Classical Tradition. The acrimonious debates in aesthetics and politics were conducted with the traditional strategies of the classical ars disputandi on both sides. Under the duress of the heaviest satirical attacks, Romanticism began gradually to see itself as one movement, giving rise to the problematic opposition of Classical and Romantic. The construction of this rough divide, however, was indispensable for the clarification of different positions in the hubbub of conflicting voices, and has also proved critical in literary and cultural studies which cannot do without such subsumptions. The Classical Tradition, encompassing Christianity, emerges as an ongoing event from Greek and Latin antiquity running through to our time.

Platonic Romanticism had a dark underside from its inception: Romantic Disillusionism, encompassing the Gothic and the new demonic doppelganger. The Classical Tradition's conflict between Plato and Pyrrho, foundationalism and scepticism, optimism and pessimism was thus continued. Lord Byron's was the most listened-to and echoed voice of Romantic Disillusionism in Europe, though by far not the only one. This comparative study of a multiplicity of sceptical English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Czech voices shows how traditional Pyrrhonic arguments were updated to suit the decades of the Romantic Movement, surviving as a subversive countercurrent to later Victorianism and resurging in the literature of the Decadence and Fin de Siècle.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a particularly tumultuous period in Anglo-French relations that witnessed the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1802 and 1803-1815, respectively), the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), and the July Revolution (1830) - not to mention the gradual expansion of the British Empire, and the complex cultural shifts that led from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In this book, Marcus Tomalin reassesses the ways in which writers such as Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cobbett, and William Hazlitt acquired and deployed French. This intricate topic is examined from a range of critical perspectives, which draw upon recent research into European Romanticism, linguistic historiography, comparative literature, social and cultural history, education theory, and translation studies. This interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate the deep ambivalences that characterised British appraisals of the French language in the literature of the Romantic period.

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.

Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to languages, landscapes – both geographical and metaphorical – and literatures.

This book comprises eleven essays by leading scholars of early nineteenth-century British literature and periodical culture. The collection addresses the many and varied links between politics and the emotions in Romantic periodicals, from the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, to the 1832 Reform Bill. In so doing, it deepens our understanding of the often conflicted relations between politics and feelings, and raises questions relevant to contemporary debates on affect studies and their relation to political criticism. The respective chapters explore both the politics of emotion and the emotional register of political discussion in radical, reformist and conservative periodicals. They are arranged chronologically, covering periodicals from Pigs’ Meat to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Spectator. Recurring themes include the contested place of emotion in radical political discourse; the role of the periodical in mediating action and performance; the changing affective frameworks of cultural politics (especially concerning gender and nation), and the shifting terrain of what constitutes appropriate emotion in public political discourse.