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Two hundred years after the massacre of peaceful protestors who had gathered in St Peter's Field, Manchester, to hear 'Orator' Henry Hunt speak for Parliamentary Reform, this volume brings together scholars of the Romantic Era to assess the implications of such state violence in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America. Chapters explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of 'the people' to participate in government were reflected and revised in the works of figures such as P. B. Shelley, John Keats, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, John Cahuac and J.M.W. Turner. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and as a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force. On the whole, the book advances the hypothesis that 'Peterloo', as the event was termed to evoke the British military victory at Waterloo, was most of all a conflict over the perceived and aspirational identities of the participants and observers and that the conflict manifested the identity of 'the people' as claimants on government. Recognizing popular claim-making was crucial for the passage of Reform. Though Peterloo resulted in an immediate backlash of repression, it contributed in the longer term to the change in attitude enabling Reform. The book concludes that state violence ultimately proved ineffective against popular participation, though it also uncovers the ways in which repressive measures function as a subtle and hidden kind of violence that discourages civic activism and continues to call forth cultural resistance.

Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today. Rather than recounting how different schools of theory and criticism have viewed the Gothic, these chapters argue how Gothic and theory have defined and affected - and still define and affect -- each other in particular aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural realms. In each case, the Gothic is revealed as containing and inciting the very theoretical schemes and assumptions that have purported to explain it from particular perspectives. Hence the Gothic, as it has progressed across Western and world history, emerges as both a producer of what each school of theory promulgates and an active Gothic-izer of each scheme, thereby advancing the development of every theoretical enterprise in Gothic works. This approach allows each essayist to reflect from the perspective of 2018-19 on how a particular realm of theory has opened up forms of the Gothic to our understandings and to the wider possibilities of Gothic texts (broadly defined) as performers of "cultural work." But it equally enlists each of them to explain how those very openings are incipient in forms of the Gothic and how the Gothic can also question existing theoretical claims, challenge them, and reorient them.

The nineteenth-century Italian Risorgimento, or ‘resurgence’, re-drew Europe’s map to create a new nation-state: Italy. Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture argues that the Risorgimento radically shaped nineteenth-century British political, literary and cultural landscapes. Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this study examines the intersections of literary works by Mary Shelley, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Giovanni Ruffini, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others with journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain’s imaginative investment in this seismic geopolitical realignment. This book explores four political focal points of British engagement with Italian unification, moving between two crucial turning points that shaped Europe’s geopolitical map, the 1815 Congress of Vienna and 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, to excavate the unsettling fusion of political optimism and disaffection produced through the collision of British and Italian politics and culture. British and Anglo-Italian responses to the Risorgimento reveal a complicated, decades-long print contest that played out across high literary modes, pamphlets and propaganda, memoirs and travelogues, parliamentary debates, journalism and emerging genres like sensation fiction. This study argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe’s geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe. These chapters demonstrate that the nation-building enterprise of Risorgimento culture was a participatory, international field crossing borders, print forms, political parties and literary genres, which played an invigorating role for British political discourse and print culture.

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the scales and shapes of time, the consistency of timespace, and the nature of history.

Charting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book discovers a poetics of figuration in English tragic drama. It demonstrates that our recognition of the dramatic person in printed drama of the early modern period is involved in the terms on which those plays were first realized in the theatre. Since many such tragedies challenge and confuse the straightforward discernment of dramatic character, a strong distinction between performance studies and literary criticism breaks down in the course of an attentive reading. In the past this problem of recognition was artificially resolved or ignored so as to launch various sorts of moral interpretation. In fact, the ethical and political difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Moreover, the epistemological issues created by these games of personation have been inadequately addressed by historicist criticism purporting to unearth the social, religious, and political impulsions of Shakespearean drama. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, The Origins of English Revenge Tragedyholds that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in the play.

Featuring previously unpublished material alongside famous plays,this pioneering edition provides access to some of the most popular plays of the nineteenth century. Characterised by exhilarating plots, large-scale special effects and often transgressive characterisation, these dramas are still exciting for modern readers. This anthology lays the foundation for further scholarly work on sensation drama and focuses public attention on to this influential and immensely popular genre.It features five plays from writers including Dion Boucicault and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These are supported by a substantial critical apparatus, which adds further value to the anthology by providing rich details on performance history and textual variants. The critical introduction situates the genre in its cultural context and argues for the significance of sensation drama to shifting theatrical cultures and practices.

This book explores Tennyson’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson’s borrowing of the earlier poet’s words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson’s poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised. Focusing on some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career, including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson’s poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.

This collection of new essays offers in-depth analysis of the multi-faceted relationship between women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain. This period witnessed the proliferation of print culture and the greater availability of periodicals for an increasingly diverse readership and, as a result, the Victorian periodical press has been of keen interest to scholars working across a range of specialist fields in recent decades. No previous volume, however, has offered as rich or as diverse a set of essays on women’s periodicals and women authors, editors, engravers, illustrators and readers of this crucial period in the history of periodical culture. This was, after all, a significant period in women’s history, in which the ‘Woman Question’ dominated public debate, and writers and commentators from a range of perspectives engaged with ideas and ideals about womanhood ranging from the ‘Angel in the House’ to the New Woman. Essays in this collection gather together expertise from leading scholars as well as emerging new voices in order to produce sustained analysis of underexplored periodicals and authors and to reveal in new ways the dynamic and integral relationship between women’s history and print culture in Victorian society.