Robert Southey History, Politics, Religion

by Andrews, Stuart

• ISBN13: 9780230115132
• ISBN10: 0230115136
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780230338067
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Robert Southey's preoccupation with the presumed danger of admitting Catholics to Parliament, following the Irish Act of Union, has always been an embarrassment to his admirers. Stuart Andrews, in Robert Southey,argues that the Poet Laureate's denunciation of global Catholicism is essential to understanding his life, works, and times. On this issue Southey was absolutely consistentfrom his first visit to Lisbon in 1795 to his Colloquiespublished in 1829. Echoes of the debate have faded, but Southey's partisan rhetoric reflects its intensity and reveals much about the religious culture and concern for English identity in this stormy period

Author Biography

Stuart Andrews is currently the librarian at Wells Mendip Museum in the United Kingdom. He holds an honors degree in History from Cambridge University and has written extensively on the interface of politics, literature, and religion. His most recent works are The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789-99; Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric 1770-1814; and Irish Rebellion: Protestant Polemic 1798-1900.

Table of Contents

“Religious issues were central in British politics in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.  And, as Andrews clearly demonstrates, Robert Southey, too often dismissed as a peripheral poet, was at the center of the disputes which culminated in Catholic Emancipation.  Andrews lucidly explains the ideological context of the controversy and fixes the Poet Laureate firmly in it, as the champion of the Church of England against perceived threats to its constitutional position from its nonconformist and, above all, Roman Catholic critics.” --W. A. Speck, author of Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters