Radicalism in British literary culture, 1650-1830

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Cornelia D. J. Pearsall

"In the wake of the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a beloved friend and the subject of In Memoriam. Tennyson wrote a range of formally inventive and intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. Pearsall explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation - theological, social, political, and personal - and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics." "The book investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with theological movements in early Victorian Britain that propounded the innovative and highly influential belief in an oncoming rapture. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems by tracking his lifelong intellectual investment in philological scholarship and archaeological exploration, including Victorian debates over the historical verifiability of Homer's raptured Troy. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall illustrates the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career."--Jacket.

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James Chandler

1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo.". But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Much of the writing from 1819, argues James Chandler, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place as history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

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Terry Eagleton

"Terry Eagleton's book provides a novel account of Ireland's neglected 'national' intellectuals. This extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt and Sheridan Le Fanu, was a kind of Irish version of 'Bloomsbury' (they were doctors, lawyers, economists, writers and amateurs, rather than academics). Their work, much of it published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests, and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community, in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of 'traditional' and 'organic' intellectuals, and maps the nature of its relation to the young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and its place in political life."--Jacket.

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Jon Thomas Rowland

Part 1 offers readings of homosexuality in early homophobic tracts, in Grub Street productions lampooning a preferment dispute involving the bishop of London, in the London newspapers, in political pamphlets attacking Lord Hervey, and in a casebook by a clergyman defending himself against the charge of sodomizing one of his own parishioners. Part 2 offers readings of homoeroticism in Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination and his Odes, where homosexuality manifests itself indirectly, through elision and through Akenside's own revision of his most homoerotic passages. Finally, Part 3 returns to read homosexuality in political life, but later in the century, when the idea is exploited by Wilkes and Churchill, with some very surprising results, in their campaign against George III and his prime minister, the earl of Bute.