Romanticism's Debatable Lands

by Lamont, Claire; Rossington, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780230507852
• ISBN10: 0230507859
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book uses the theme of "debatable lands," a term first applied to disputed parts of the Anglo-Scottish border, to explore aspects of writing in the Romantic period. Walter Scott brought it to a wider public, and the phrase came to be applied, by metaphorical extension, to debates which were not so much geographical but intellectual, political or artistic. These debates are pursued in a collection of essays grouped under the headings "Britain and Ireland" and Europe and Beyond."

Author Biography

CLAIRE LAMONT is Professor of English Romantic Literature at Newcastle University. She specializes in English and Scottish Literature, especially the Romantic poets, Austen and Scott, and the literary representation of architecture. Her edition of Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate appeared in 2000.

MICHAEL ROSSINGTON is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University. His principal research interests are in the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and republican ideas in Romantic-period writing. His editions of Percy Shelley's The Cenci and Mary Shelley's Valperga were published in 2000.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Britain and Ireland

Writing on the Borders

"Viewing Most Things Thro' False Mediums": Iolo Morganwyg (1747-1826), Romantic Forgery and English Perceptions of Wales

"Looking back upon a Highland Prospect": Scott,The Lady of the Lakeand the Lowland/Celtic Fringe

He's Come Undone: Gender, Territory, and Hysteria inRob Roy

"The Shadow Line": James Currie's "Life of Burns" and British Romanticism

The Debatable Borders of English and Scottish Song and Ballad Collections

Debatable Geographies of Romantic Nostalgia: The Redemptive Landscape in Wordsworth and Cobbett

John Clare and the Question of Place

Europe and Beyond

Uneasy Settlement: Wordsworth and Emigration

Philosophy's Debatable Land in Coleridge'sBiographia Literaria

Interrogating the "Valley of Wonders": Some Romantic-Period Debates about Chamonix-Mont Blanc

"Those Syren-Haunted Seas Beside": Naples in the Work of Staël, Hemans and the Shelleys

Helen Maria Williams'Peruand the Spanish Legacy of the British Empire

Borderline Engagements: The Crusades in Romantic-Period Drama

Debating India: Southey andThe Curse of Kehama

Debating China: Romantic Fictions of the Qing Empire, 1760-1800

"Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits": The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century

Select Bibliography

Index

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