This study of the literary culture in Britain in the years after Waterloo begins with an account of two fatal duels, the famous duel of 16 February 1821, in which John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, fell, and the less well known duel of 26 March 1822, in which Alexander Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer, was killed. These duels, Richard Cronin suggests, bring into sharp focus the distinctive features of literary culture in the years after Waterloo. The book ranges widely but at its centre are the three literary phenomena that best define the period: Walter Scott's novels, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It was a culture constituted not by the doctrine of sympathy that its leading writers held in common but by the antagonisms that divided them, a culture in which England vied with Scotland, literary and political principles converged, and there was a volatile relationship between the public and the private. These were the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and literature came to be decisively identified with print rather than with manuscript. Its most prized cultural products were miscellaneous. Superficial, even heartless, responses to the world were valued. Male writers responded aggressively to the threat that literature might be a kind of writing largely consumed by women and increasingly produced by them. This was the culture that writers such as Wordsworth repudiated, but the relationship between the culture that Wordsworth represented and the culture that he opposed, like the relationship between duellists, was at once violently aggressive and mutually supportive: each, as many writers of the period recognized, was dependent on the other.

Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo

Literature & Fiction

Cronin, Richard

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

The Robert Browning volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning to offer a wide selection of work written throughout Browning's career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died. The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the volume also constitutes a kind of biography. It reveals a poet who began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment throughout a writing career of more than fifty years. Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues, and the dramatic monologues are fully represented in this volume, but he was also a narrative poet, a poet of philosophical reflection, and a poet who fashioned an extraordinary variety of lyric measures. This volume reveals Browning as a far more versatile poet than he is often taken to be. There are two important prose items, an essay on Shelley and a letter to Ruskin which clarify Browning's intellectual stance. The Notes include brief headnotes to each poem followed by detailed annotation. Browning is often a difficult poet, and the notes are designed to assist the reader to arrive at a full understanding of the poems. The volume also includes a general introduction and a detailed chronology of Browning's life and times.

Robert Browning: 21st-Century Oxford Authors

McMillan, Dorothy

History & Criticism

Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.

Byron's Don Juan: The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Cambridge University Press

Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems fromthe Victorian era by a  renowned scholar. The selectionincludes a range of canonical and lesser known writers Skilfully conveys the breadth and diversity ofnineteenth-century poetryOffers an ideal balance of canonical and less well-knownwritersAllows readers to explore the poetry of the Victorian era,through the eyes of one of the most renowned scholars in thefieldPoets covered include Matthew Arnold,  Emily Brontë,Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, A. H.Clough, G. M. Hopkins, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, D. G.Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Alfred Tennyson, OscarWilde

Reading Victorian Poetry (Wiley Blackwell Reading Poetry)

Wiley/Blackwell

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part II, Volume 10: Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day (1801)

A selection of Anti-Jacobin novels reprinted in full with annotations. The set includes works by male and female writers holding a range of political positions within the Anti-Jacobin camp, and represents the French Revolution, American Revolution, Irish Rebellion and political unrest in Scotland.

Johnson, Claudia L.

Crăciun, Adriana

Cox, Philip

Verhoeven, W.M.

Routledge

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part II, Volume 6: Anon., Berkeley Hall; or, The Pupil of Experience (1796)

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part II, Volume 7: Jane West, A Tale of the Times (1799)

A selection of Anti-Jacobin novels reprinted in full with annotations. The set includes works by male and female writers holding a range of political positions within the Anti-Jacobin camp, and represents the French Revolution, American Revolution, Irish Rebellion and political unrest in Scotland.

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