The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

Description

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

James Chandler is Director of the Franke Institute of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Maureen N. McLane is Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University.

'The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics.' Australian Book Review