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This book examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works the author shows how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature. While he considers the influence of Milton and the ‘Ossian’ poems, as well as of philosophers including Locke, Diderot, Berkeley and Thomas Reid, much of the book is taken up with new readings of writers of the period. These include canonical authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Keats and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as less-well-known writers such as Charlotte Brooke and Ann Batten Cristall. There is also a chapter on the popular genre of improving tales for children by writers such as Barbara Hofland and Mary Sherwood. The author finds that, despite the nostalgia for a bardic age of inward vision, the chief emphasis in the period is on the compensations of enhanced sensitivity to music and words. This compensation becomes associated with the loss and gain involved in the modernity of a post-bardic age. Representations of blindness and the blind are found to elucidate a tension at the heart of the Romantic period, between the desire for immediacy of vision on the one hand and, on the other, the historical self-consciousness that always attends it.

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.

This book explores the interaction of literature and music in the Atlantic world in the age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. It focuses on the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era's intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures with primary attention to Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining attitudes to music and its performance of leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and the attempts of Francis Hopkinson and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.

The construction of London's underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London's answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of Émile Zola's underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This book explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals not only the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, but the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable.

Radical Romantics engages with the critical frameworks of cultural geography, cartography, and the burgeoning field of oceanic studies in order to reformulate theories of colonization and empire in the Romantic period. In so doing, the book poses fundamental questions about our understanding of both territorial and imagined space. What are the means by which people can conceive of geographical space without resorting to the terms of nationalism? Is it possible to imagine a space beyond territory, as movement itself? How can we articulate the overlap between mapped and lived space? Rather than offering a single answer to these questions, Radical Romantics expands outward, as if from the centre of a compass, tracing the myriad ways in which authors resist the imperative of colonial and imperial conceptions of space. In studying texts that range from William Blake’s visionary poetry to prophetic pamphlets, from Lord Byron’s Eastern romances to travel narratives about Jerusalem and Africa, this book explores moments where imaginative space and territorial space overlap in the service of radical geographies.

Robert Southey did not exaggerate when he described the England of his day as ‘South American mad’. As Spain's hold on its colonies progressively weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thousands of British scientists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers rushed to take advantage of the enticing opportunities Spanish America offered. Britain's fascination with the region displayed itself in poems, plays, operas, political tracts, news reportage, travel narratives, and stock market quotations. Creole patriots such as Francisco de Miranda and Andrés Bello gathered in London to solicit aid for their revolutions while ministers debated tactics for liberating both the peoples and the untapped wealth of Spain's colonies. Through critical reconsiderations of both canonical and lesser-known Romantic texts, from Helen Maria Williams' Peru to Samuel Rogers' The Voyage of Columbus and Byron's The Age of Bronze, this book reveals the untold story of Romantic-era Britain's Spanish American obsession. Although historians have traditionally characterized Britain's relationship with Spanish America as commercial rather than colonial, the book explores the significant rhetorical overlap between formal and informal strategies of rule. In the absence of a coherent imperial policy regarding Spain's colonies, Britain struggled to justify its actions by means of the problematic assertion that British primacy was authorized by a political, cultural, ethical and even historical identification with the peoples of Spanish America. By examining the ways in which this discourse of British-Spanish American similitude was deployed and increasingly strained throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book demonstrates that British writing about Spanish America redefines the anxieties, ambivalences and contradictions that characterize Romantic Imperialism.