Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt (Romanticism in Perspective)

This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. "In this book Tim Fulford examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain. He argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. He portrays their influence on each other as a series of unstable struggles and alliances in which the formulation of an authoritative masculinity was a political as well as aesthetic issue. Fulford investigates the writers' portrayals of women and their collaborations with women authors and throws new light on their poetry, their journalism and their aesthetic theory by exploring their reactions to the sexual and political scandals of the Regency. Discussing Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Radcliffe, Malthus and Mary Robinson, he offers new perspectives on current critical debates concerning the Gothic, the sublime and gender."--Jacket Although many books have studied writers and alcohol in modern American literature, the rich culture of drinking and the many poems and narratives about it in the Romantic period in England have been entirely neglected. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink 1780-1830 is the first study to describe the bulk and variety of writings about drinking to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological, and medical context to demonstrate the importance of drunkenness in the works of a number of major and minor writers of the period and to suggest that during these years, for a short time, the pleasures and pains of drinking are held in a vivacious balance. The book argues that the figure of the drinker tests the margins of the human being, either as a beast, savage, or thing or, on the other edge of the human range, as a free, inspired spirit This book examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in theory and practice in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain and argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. It portrays their influence on each other as a series of unstable struggles and alliances in which the formulation of an authoritative masculinity was a political as well as an aesthetic issue. The author investigates the writers' portrayals of women and their collaborations with women writers and throws new light on their nature poetry by relating it to their reactions to the sexual and political scandals of the Regency. "This book focuses on some of the greatest writers and artists of European Romanticism, including S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth, J. M. W. Turner, Goethe, Holderlin and, in the later nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold. Concluding with a discussion of the significance of Romanticism for our understanding of postmodernity, its various chapters explore the place of the biblical canon as the central element in the shift from the sacred to the secular, and the place of the Bible in the development of our concept of Weltliteratur, or world literature, as definitive of culture. This book will be of interest to all concerned with art, literature and the development of biblical criticism and religious thought."--BOOK JACKET Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Some Versions of Masculinity in Romanticism....Pages 1-30 Burke: the Gendering of Power....Pages 31-65 Coleridge in the 1790s: ‘Lord of Thy Utterance’....Pages 66-128 ‘Manly Reflection’: Masculinity in Coleridge’s Criticism....Pages 129-154 Sexual Politics: Burke,Coleridge and Cobbett....Pages 155-176 Wordsworth: the ‘Time Dismantled Oak’?....Pages 177-208 De Quincey and Hazlitt: To Have and Have Not the Power....Pages 209-243 Back Matter....Pages 244-250