The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey from an international galaxy of scholars writing new pieces, specifically for a student readership, under the editorship of Duncan Wu.

Arguing against a persistent view of Romantic lyricism as an inherently introspective mode, this book examines how Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and John Clare recognized end employed the mode's immense capacity for engaging reading audiences in reflections both personal and social. Zimmerman focuses new attention on the Romantic lyric's audiences - not the silent, passive auditor of canonical paradigms, but historical readers and critics who can tell us more than we have asked about the mode's rhetorical possibilities. She situates poems within the specific circumstances of their production and consumption, including the aftermath in England of the French Revolution, rural poverty, the processes of parliamentary enclosure, the biographical contours of poet's careers, and the myriad exchanges among poets, patrons, publishers, critics, and readers in the literary marketplace.

Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of ?imagination” in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological?an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical?a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations. The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins's odes figure Scotland as the site of a ?superstitious” poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind's projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts. Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt's political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt's enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics. The final sections of the book engage Shelley's complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets ?unacknowledged legislators,” suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly ?historical” action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between ?superstition,” ?imagination,” and ?history” in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism.

US period drama starring Christina Ricci as an air stewardess working for Pan American Airways in the 1960s at the dawn of the jet engine and mass public air travel. Joining Head Stewardess Maggie (Ricci) on the Pan Am flight crew are Laura (Margot Robbie), an inexperienced stewardess Maggie takes under her wing, and the relentless charmer Ted (Michael Mosley). The episodes are: 'Pilot', 'We'll Always Have Paris', 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner', 'Eastern Exposure', 'One Coin in a Fountain', 'The Genuine Article', 'Truth Or Dare', 'Unscheduled Departure', 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang', 'Secrets and Lies', 'Diplomatic Relations', 'New Frontiers', 'Romance Languages' and '1964'.

Throughout Europe, nostalgia and modernization embraced around 1800: the rise of historicism coincided with the emergence of the modern nation-state. Poetical, cultural changes intersected with political, institutional ones: a Romantic taste for medieval or tribal antiquity benefited from a modernization-driven transfer of cultural relics into the public sphere. This process involved the establishment of museums, libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the dissemination of historical knowledge through text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays, operas and paintings, monuments and restorations. Antiquaries, philologists and historians produced a new past and rendered history a matter of public, national interest and collective identification. This international and interdisciplinary collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state. Contributors are Ellinoor Bergvelt, Eveline G. Bouwers, Peter Fritzsche, Paula Henrikson, Sharon Ann Holt, Lotte Jensen, Krisztina Lajosi, Joep Leerssen, Susanne Legêne, Marita Mathijsen, Mathias Meirlaen, Peter Rietbergen, Anne-Marie Thiesse, and Robert Verhoogt.