In this new volume, Andrew Ashfield illustrates how women extended the horizons of Romanticism by their insistent engagement with social issues such as slavery, child labor and women workers. His previous volume, "Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838," explored how women poets made important contributions to major areas of Romanticism such as landscape and seascape. Together these two volumes add new dimensions to the study of Romanticism by showing how the solitary meditation by the sea developed concurrently with major social concerns. Ashfield exposes a much more complicated relationship between the self and society than has previously prevailed in our assessments of Romanticism.

This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

This volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.

From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) to the last twentieth-century Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), anthologies have been a prime institution for the preservation and mediation of poetry. The importance of anthologies for creating and re-creating the canon of English poetry, for introducing ‘new' programmes of poetry, as a record of changing poetic fashions, audience tastes and reading practices, or as a profitable literary commodity has often been asserted. Despite its impact, however, the poetry anthology in itself has attracted surprisingly little critical interest in Britain or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This volume is the first publication to explore the largely unmapped field of poetry anthologies in Britain. Essays written from a wide range of perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and the point of view of poets, editors, publishers and cultural institutions, aim to do justice to the typological, functional and historical variety with which this form of publication has manifested itself - from early modern print culture to the postmodern age of the world wide web.

A wide-ranging and accessible account of the pioneering professional women writers who flourished during the Romantic period.

Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley sets out to determine whether each of the diaries by three female writers – namely, Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley – approximates the Philippe-Lejeunean concept of the diary as lacework or the more sweeping view, typical of the broadly conceived autobiography, which Georges Gusdorf famously likened to the mirror. The author explores Burney’s, Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s attempts at concealing the gaps between their narrating and narrated ‘I’s, as well as examining their diary lacunae, especially helpful for illustrating the gradual emergence of the diarists’ individual selves. Broader issues, connected with diary poetics, such as the use of metaphors and symbols, the degree of reliance on dialogue and ensuing narrativity, down to handling the past by means of anachronous eccentricities, are also subject to examination. The study is based on the assumption that the journal is a literary genre, which can be investigated with tools routinely used for the examination of literary texts. Yet, beyond the issues of literariness, in accordance with Philippe Lejeune’s dictum, the three journals reveal the writers’ diaristic practices. In fact, it seems that issues of the journal genre and the journal practice cannot be divorced, and neither can their lacework and mirror aspects.

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.