Palgrave Key Concepts: Literature / Key Concepts in Romantic Literature

What is Romanticism?'.- An introductory discussion which clearly addresses the vexed critical question of the nature of Romanticism.- 'Historical Definitions and Conceptualizations of Romanticism'?.- Discusses the changing manner in which Romanticism has been understood from the late eighteenth century to the present day.- 'CONTEXTS: History, Politics, Culture'.- Detailed and clearly written accounts of the momentous historical, political and social issues and events which shaped the Romantic period from the French Revolution onwards. After an account of British Politics from 1789 to 1832, subsequent chapters here include 'Empire and Travel', 'Feminism and the Position of Women', 'Industry and Economics', 'Ireland and the 'Catholic Question', 'Medicine and Science', 'Religion and Atheism', 'Sexualities' and 'Slavery, Abolition and African-British Literature'.- 'TEXTS: Themes, Issues, Concepts?.- This section addresses the key themes of Romantic literature, beginning with an account of the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Smith, and Robinson, and a discussion of their successors Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hemans, and Landon. Other chapters include 'Joanna Baillie and Romantic-Era Drama', 'Irish, Scottish and Welsh Poetry', 'Medievalism, the Sublime and the Gothic', 'The Novel' and 'Satire'.- 'CRITICISM: Approaches, Theory, Practice'?.- Discusses criticism of the Romantics from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Chapters include 'Contemporary and Victorian Reception', 'Twentieth-Century Criticism from Modernism to the New Criticism', and 'Modern Critical Approaches'. This last section offers a guide to the critical movements which have transformed Romantic studies from the 1980s in accounts of criticism 'From Deconstruction to Post-Colonial and Psychoanalytical Criticism', 'From Historicism to Ecological Criticism' and 'Gender Criticism'.

JANE MOORE is Reader in English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, UK. She is an experienced teacher of Romantic women's writing and Romantic poetry and has published widely in these fields, most particularly, Mary Wollstonecraft (1999) and, more recently, The Satires of Thomas Moore (2003). She is co-editor (with Catherine Belsey) of The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, (2nd Edition, 1997).

JOHN STRACHAN is Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland, UK. He is the author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (2007) and the editor of many editions of Romantic poetry including British Satire 1785-1840 (2003), the Poems of John Keats: A Sourcebook (2003) and Leigh Hunt's Poetical Works (2003). He is Associate Editor for Romanticism for the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th edition, 2009).