Bringing together leading scholars from the USA, UK and Europe, this is the first substantial study of the seminal influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on British Romanticism. Reconsidering Rousseau's connection to canonical Romantic authors such as Wordsworth, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism also explores his impact on a wide range of literature, including anti-Jacobin fiction, educational works, familiar essays, nature writing and political discourse. Convincingly demonstrating that the relationship between Rousseau's thought and British Romanticism goes beyond mere reception or influence to encompass complex forms of connection, transmission and appropriation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism is a vital new contribution to scholarly understanding of British Romantic literature and its transnational contexts.

This book re-opens the question of Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining the relationship between his confessional writings and his political theory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in which Rousseau's writings were mediated by the speeches and actions of the French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gain a clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to English writers. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearse and reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of the French revolutionary Terror.

This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.

This volume argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognised, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity's evolution.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

A brilliant polymath and part of the 'first wave' of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world. While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. In 1790s Britain, China was terra incognita. Manning undertook a quest to learn the secrets of its language and culture. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. But when he returned to England, his ideas confronted an increasingly Sinophobic climate and he failed to publish the grand work his peers had expected for so long. After his death, his outward-looking vision was eclipsed by the English-rural poetic vision of Romanticism, and he was forgotten. Manning’s extraordinary story, here told in full for the first time using recently discovered archival sources, sheds a new light on English Romanticism and the course of cultural exchange between Britain and Asia at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

During the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex and ambivalent responses to this threatening literary invasion. Confronted with foreign texts that seemed both attractive and repulsive, Mortensen argues, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge publicly distanced themselves from European sensationalism, even as they assimilated and revised its conventions in their own writing.