Cobbett was one of the greatest journalists of his day. Following a career in the British army he began writing as the loyalist 'Peter Porcupine' in the United States, defending all things British against the French Revolution and its supporters. This is the first collection on Cobbett and contains essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines.

This is the first book to bring perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. Particularly significant is that field's attention not only to the work of anti-war protest, but more purposefully to considerations of how peace can actively be fostered, established, and sustained. Bravely resisting discourses of military propaganda, writers such as Amelia Opie, Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, John Keats, and Jane Austen embarked on the challenging and urgent rhetorical work of imagining—and inspiring others to imagine—the possibility of peace. The writers formulate a peace imaginary in various registers. Sometimes this means identifying and eschewing traditional militaristic tropes in order to craft alternative images for a patriotism compatible with peace. Other times it means turning away from xenophobic discourse to write about relations with other nations in terms other than those of conflict. If historically informed literary criticism has illustrated the importance of writing about war during the Romantic period, this volume invites readers to redirect critical attention to move beyond discourses of war, and to recognize the era's complex and vibrant writing about and for peace.

The first applied research volume in Scottish Romanticism, this collection foregrounds the concept of progress as 'improvement' as a constitutive theme of Scottish writing during the long eighteenth century. It explores improvement as the animating principle behind Scotland’s post-1707 project of modernization, a narrative both shaped and reflected in the literary sphere. It represents a vital moment in Romantic studies, as a 'four-nations' interrogation of the British context reaches maturity. Equally, the volume contributes to a central concern in the study of Scottish culture, amplifying a critical synthesis of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This collection of essays is the result of a major conference focusing specifically on the role of Scotland’s print culture in shaping the literature and politics of the long eighteenth century. In contrast to previous studies, this work treats Blackwood’s Magazine as the culmination of a long tradition rather than a starting point.

This book challenges the assumption – just as alive today as it was in the nineteenth century – that the political sphere was an arena of reason in which feelings had no part to play. It shows that feelings were a central, albeit contested, aspect of the political culture of the period. Radical leaders were accused of inflaming the passions; the state and its propertied supporters were charged with callousness; radicals grounded their claims to citizenship in the universalist assumption that workers had the same capacity for feeling as their social betters (denied at this time). It sheds new light on the relationship between protest movements and the state by showing how one of the central issues at stake in the conflict between radicals and their oppressors was the feelings of the propertied classes.

The story of the Peterloo massacre, a defining moment in the history of British democracy, told with passion and authority. 'Excellent' Zadie Smith 'Fast-paced and full of fascinating detail' Tim Clayton 'A superb account of one of the defining moments in modern British history' Tristram Hunt 'Peterloo is one of the greatest scandals of British political history... Riding tells this tragic story with mesmerising skill' John Bew On a hot late summer's day, a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St Peter's Field. They came from all over Lancashire – ordinary working-class men, women and children – walking to the sound of hymns and folk songs, wearing their best clothes and holding silk banners aloft. Their mood was happy, their purpose wholly serious: to demand fundamental reform of a corrupt electoral system. By the end of the day fifteen people, including two women and a child, were dead or dying and 650 injured, hacked down by drunken yeomanry after local magistrates panicked at the size of the crowd. Four years after defeating the 'tyrant' Bonaparte at Waterloo, the British state had turned its forces against its own people as they peaceably exercised their time-honoured liberties. As well as describing the events of 16 August in shattering detail, Jacqueline Riding evokes the febrile state of England in the late 1810s, paints a memorable portrait of the reform movement and its charismatic leaders, and assesses the political legacy of the massacre to the present day. As fast-paced and powerful as it is rigorously researched, Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre adds significantly to our understanding of a tragic staging-post on Britain's journey to full democracy.

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.