Originally published in 1971, this book outlines the period of Germany’s belated industrial revolution and suggests why German literature does not, before the 1880s, contribute to the tradition of European realism. It considers the alternatives to realism offered in three genres of drama, poetry and prose fiction. The book closely analyses specific texts, both in the original and in translation, with comparisons with non-German works.

Once the dominant literary form, poetry was gradually eclipsed by the realist novel; indeed, by 1940 W. H. Auden was able to note, "Poetry makes nothing happen." In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Franco Felluga explores the cultural background of poetry's marginalization by examining nineteenth-century reactions to Romantic poetry and ideology. Focusing on the work of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as periodical reviews, student manuals, and contemporary medical journals, the book details the period's two contending (and equally outrageous) claims regarding poetry. Scott's poetry, on the one hand, was continually represented as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Byron's, by contrast, was represented either as a cancer in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms. The book concludes with a coda on Alfred Lord Tennyson, which illustrates how the Victorian reception of Scott and Byron affected the most popular poetic genius of midcentury. Ultimately, The Perversity of Poetry uncovers how the shift to a rhetoric of health allowed critics to oppose what they perceived as a potent and potentially dangerous influence on the age, the very thing that would over the course of the century be marginalized into such obscurity: poetry, thanks to its perverse insistence on making something happen.

'This excellent book delivers an up-to-date reading of the current literature in rural geography. It provides a commentary on the theoretical development of rural studies and is supported by apposite case studies. Rural conveys the excitement, diversity and depth of rural geography to students in a challenging but clear manner, enabling them to engage successfully with the discipline at an advanced level.'-Dr Richard Yarwood, University of Plymouth, UK.