An edited collection examining the construction of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the performance of sacred drama on the English public stage was prohibited by law and custom left over from the Reformation: successive Examiners of Plays, under the control of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, censored and suppressed both devotional and blasphemous plays alike. Whilst the Biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the epic, and the oratorio, nineteenth-century spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about bodily performance, impersonation, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation, and that were in fact bolstered by the return of Catholicism to public prominence after the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and the restoration of the Catholic Archbishoprics in 1850. But even as anti-Catholic prejudice at mid-century reached new heights, the turn towards medievalism in the visual arts, antiquarianism in literary history, and the 'popular' in constitutional reform placed England's pre- Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national drama. This book explores the recovery of the texts of the extant mystery-play cycles undertaken by antiquarians in the early nineteenth century and the eventual return of sacred drama to English public theatres at the start of the twentieth century. Consequently, law, literature, politics, and theatre history are brought into conversation with one another in order to illuminate the history of sacred drama and Protestant ant-theatricalism in England in the long nineteenth-century.

A lively, richly illustrated study of iconic caricatures, showing the interrelationship between art, satire and politics in the Romantic period.

This study argues for Hogg's centrality to British Romanticism, resituating his work in relation to many of his more famous Romantic contemporaries. Hogg creates a unique literary style which, the author argues, is best described as 'kaleidoscopic' in view of its similarities with David Brewster's kaleidoscope, invented in 1816.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of British Romantic literature and an authoritative guide to all aspects of the movement including its historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts, and its connections with the literature and thought of other countries. All the major Romantic writers are covered alongside lesser known writers.

Horgan analyses the importance of songs in British eighteenth-century culture with specific reference to their political meaning. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining the perspectives of literary studies and cultural history, the utilitarian power of songs emerges across four major case studies.

Historians and literary scholars tend to agree that British intellectual culture underwent a fundamental transformation between 1770 and 1845. Yet they are unusually divided about the nature of that transformation and whether it is best understood as an epistemic rupture from, or a continuous dialogue with, the long eighteenth century. Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 rethinks the ways in which we understand the historical writing and the historical consciousness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that British historicism developed largely in quasi and para-historical genres such as memoir, biography, verse, fiction, and painting, rather than in works of 'real' history. In a number of inter-related essays on changing generic forms, styles, methods, and standards, the collection demonstrates that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary 'Romanticism' not only intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing, but that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis-a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling and imagination in historical writing-that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. In exploring this theme, the volume also seeks to consider wider questions about the philosophy of history and literature, including questions of truth, evidence, professionalization, disciplinary strategies, and methodology. At its heart is the idea that literary texts and other artistic representations of history can have historical value, and should therefore be taken seriously by practitioners of history in all its forms.