Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain

Description

Ranging across literature, theater, history, and the visual arts, this collection of essays by leading scholars in the field explores the range of places where British Romantic-period sociability transpired. The book considers how sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms, buildings, landscapes and seascapes where people gathered to converse, to eat and drink, to work and to find entertainment. At the same time, it is clear that sociability shaped place, both in the deliberate construction and configuration of venues for people to gather, and in the way such gatherings transformed how place was experienced and understood. The essays highlight literary and aesthetic experience but also range through popular entertainment and ordinary forms of labor and leisure.

Kevin Gilmartin is Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, and has been a regular visiting professor in English at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York. He works on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, with a particular interest in the politics of print culture and the history of print media. His most recent book is William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (2015).