This collection of essays throws vast new light on the most significant literary-political journal of the Romantic age. Its chapters analyze Blackwood's wide-ranging contributions on some of the most topical issues in Romantic studies, including celebrity, British versus Scottish nationalism, and the rise of terror and detective fiction.

This book pioneers a subfield of Romantic periodical studies, distinct from its neighbours in adjacent historical periods.

Building on a revival of scholarly interest in the cultural effects of early 19th-century periodicals, the essays in this collection treat periodical writing as intrinsically worthy of attention not a mere backdrop to the emergence of British Romanticism but a site in which Romantic ideals were challenged, modified, and developed. Contributors to the volume discuss a range of different periodicals, from the elite Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews, through William Cobbett's populist weekly newspaper Two-Penny Trash, to the miscellaneous monthly magazines typified by Blackwood's. While some contributors to the volume approach the phenomenon of Romanticism within periodical culture from a more materialist standpoint than others, several elaborate upon recent intersections between Romantic studies and gender studies.

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.

The tales of terror and hysteria published in the heyday (1817-32) of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine became a literary legend in the nineteenth century. Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish letters but in the development of British and American Romanticism. Intemperate in political polemic and feared for its literary assassinations, the magazinebecame just as notorious for the shocking power of its fictional offerings. These set a new standard of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm, and were to establish themselves as a landmark in the development of the short magazine story. The influence of Blackwood's quickly reached manymajor authors, including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe. This edition selects some of the best and most representative tales from the magazine's first fifteen years, including work by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt, alongside talented but now almost forgotten figures like William Mudford, William Godwin (son of the philosopher), and SamuelWarren.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses. Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s. It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.