The Romantic age, though often associated with free erotic expression, was ambivalent about what if anything sex had to do with the public sphere. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British texts often repressed the very sexual energies they claimed to be bringing into the open. The delineation of what could and could not be said and done in the name of physical pleasure was of a piece with the capitalist consecration of the social trust to the individual profit-motive. Both these practices, moreover, presupposed a determinate self with sovereignty over its own interests. Writings from and about some nominally public institutions were thus characterized by privatism—a sexual, economic and ontological withdrawal from otherness. Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One explores how this threefold ideology was both propagated and resisted, wittingly and unwittingly, successfully and unsuccessfully, in such Romantic "publics" as rape-law, sodomy-law, adultery-law, high-profile scandals, the population debates, and club-culture. It includes readings of imaginative literature by William Beckford, William Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Hays, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of political economy by Jeremy Bentham, William Cobbett, William Godwin, William Hazlitt and Thomas Robert Malthus; as well as contemporary legal treatises, popular journalism and satirical pamphlets.

The long nineteenth century (1789-1914) has been described as an axial age in the history of both bees and literature. It was the period in which the ecological and agronomic values that are still attributed to bees by modern industrial society were first established, and it was the period in which one bee species (the European honeybee) completed its dispersal to every habitable continent on Earth. At the same time, literature – which would enable, represent and in some cases repress or disavow this radical transformation of bees’ fortunes – was undergoing its own set of transformations. Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century navigates the various developments that occurred in the scientific study of bees and in beekeeping during this period of remarkable change, focusing on the bees themselves, those with whom they lived, and how old and new ideas about bees found expression in an ever-diversifying range of literary media. Ranging across literary forms and genres, the studies in this volume show the ubiquity of bees in nineteenth-century culture, demonstrate the queer specificity of writing about and with bees, and foreground new avenues for research into an animal profoundly implicated in the political, economic, ecological, emotional and aesthetic conditions of the modern world.

The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary explores ways in which England in the Romantic period conceptualized its relation both to its constituent parts within the United Kingdom and to the larger world through discussions of dance, dancing, and dancers, and through theories of dance and performance. As a referent that both engaged and constructed the body—through physical training, anatomization, spectacle and spectatorship, pathology, parody, and sentiment—dance worked to produce an English exceptional body. Discussions of dance in fiction and periodical essays, as well as its visual representation in print culture, were important ways to theorize points of contact as England was investing itself in the world as an economic and imperial power during and after the Revolutionary period. These formulations offer dance as an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in the print culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

The negative historical judgment given to George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ amounts nowadays to a gross critical blunder, and in the last three decades the story has been firmly reinstated in Eliot’s major canon. The premise of the present book is that George Eliot’s oeuvre is a compact macrotext where themes, motifs, patterns and cultural and personal archetypes recur with variations, and that ‘The Lifted Veil’ functions as the linchpin of this oeuvre. A sequential approach to the story is authorized by the use of a mimetic enunciation that simulates a gradual ‘definition’ of events, places, and characters as they have appeared to the narrating ‘I’ in the course of time until the moment of the enunciation. Contextualizing ‘The Lifted Veil’ means placing it within Eliot’s oeuvre and against the background of Victorian mid-century fiction; in a further meaning, seeing it as intersecting various contemporary genres and subgenres, such as that of the European and American ‘literature of the veil’, that of the archetypal icon of the femme fatale, that of Wilkie Collins’s ‘dead secret’ novels. The most significant facet that critical literature on ‘The Lifted Veil’ has tended to overlook is however the encrypting of the experience of a failed religious conversion and the foreshadowing of the search for a spiritual and racial identity of Daniel Deronda, the hero of Eliot’s final novel.

Exploring the rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, this book examines the psychology of Shelley’s anguished poet-Subject. Shelley’s struggles with the fragility of the ‘self’ have largely been seen as the result of thinking which connects emotional hyperstimulation to moral and political undermining of the individual ‘will’. This work takes a different approach, suggesting that Shelley’s insecurities stemmed from anxieties about the nature of aesthetic self-representation. Shame is an appropriate affective marker of such anxiety because it occurs at the cusp between internal and external self-evaluation. Shelley’s reticent poetics transfers an affective sense of shame to the reader and provokes interpretive responsibility. Paying attention to the affective contours of texts, this book presents new readings of Shelley’s major works. These interpretations show that awakening the reader’s ethical discretion creates a constructive dynamic which challenges influential deconstructive readings of the unfinished nature of Shelley’s work and thought.

This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity – a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century – Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen’s Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen’s ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.