Rhetorical traditions and British romantic literature

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Gillian Beer

This text demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications in their writings.

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Josephine McDonagh

Drawing on a broad range of sources, De Quincey's Disciplines reveals the English Opium-Eater to be a more complex and contradictory figure than is usually portrayed. All too often pigeon-holed as a latter-day Romantic and psychedelic dreamer, Thomas De Quincey is shown here to have been a prolific contributor to the periodicals of his day, on subjects as diverse as astronomy, economics, psychology, and politics. Josephine McDonagh traces the formulation of De Quincey's disciplines through an examination of his less frequently scrutinized works - political commentaries, translations of German philosophy, numerous essays, his treatise on economics - and shows that the writer aspired (often unsuccessfully) to participate in the major intellectual project of his time: the formation of new fields of knowledge, and the attempt to unify these into an organic whole. At the same time, De Quincey's works were often compromised by the demands of the market, his own political beliefs, and his tendency to produce works of 'the most provoking jumble'. Focusing on works produced in Edinburgh in reduced circumstances in the years after 1830, De Quincey's Disciplines portrays a transitional literary voice disseminating high Romantic values to a Victorian periodical audience, and a displaced High Tory regretting the end of England's ancien regime, even as he remains open to innovation in the diverse fields of knowledge. This original study recontextualizes De Quincey as a true interdisciplinarian, journalist, and man of letters. It will appeal to readers interested in new historicism and in literatures bridging the Romantic and Victorian periods.

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Richard F. Teichgraeber III

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have traditionally been portrayed as alienated outsiders, isolated voices of opposition to a society that failed to heed their words. More recently, they have been seen as unwitting advocates of capitalist culture, their texts and careers driven by its hidden logic even as they indicted its excesses. In Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom Richard F. Teichgraeber III rejects both of these views to offer a revisionist account of the relation of Emerson and Thoreau to the emerging market culture of antebellum America. Emerson and Thoreau, Teichgraeber argues, engaged their contemporary readers in a common conversation about the institutions, conduct, and moral fiber of a Northern society experiencing radical social changes and, in Southern slavery, encountering a dramatic challenge to its political values and economic way of life. Teichgraeber contends that Emerson and Thoreau knew their own purposes as social critics and set about achieving them in their published writings. In turn, the new mediators of antebellum culture - commercial publishers, editors, reviewers, and booksellers - successfully marketed the two Concord writers to a broad range of ordinary readers, discussed their works with surprising discernment, and constructed the images by which Emerson and Thoreau would eventually be canonized in American literature.

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Peter Mack

In this deeply learned contribution to the cultural and educational history of Elizabethan England, Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in the use of language on English prose writing. He shows how this training was deployed in both literary genres and in more practical legal and political settings.