Romantic Englishness Local, National and Global Selves, 1780-1850

by Higgins, David

• ISBN13: 9781137411624
• ISBN10: 1137411627
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-09-23
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Romantic Englishness investigates how narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing are produced in relation to national and transnational formations. Focusing on autobiographical texts by a wide range of authors — including Thomas Bewick, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth — this book sheds new light on the construction of national identity in the period and argues for the persistence of specifically English forms of selfhood. It not only shows how Englishness was often understood to be embodied in particular rural or occasionally urban locales, but also that Romantic writers understood these locales to be inflected by imperialism and colonialism. It therefore complicates existing critical understanding of 'Romantic ecology' by revealing the ambiguous role of place in Romantic literature.

Author Biography

David Higgins is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine (2005) and Frankenstein: Character Studies (2008). He has co-edited Studying English Literature (2010), Teaching Romanticism (2010), and Contesting Creativity, a special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'These circuits, that have been made around the globe': William Cowper's Glocal Vision
2. Local and Global Geographies: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Wordsworths
3. Labouring-Class Localism: Samuel Bamford, Thomas Bewick, William Cobbett
4. John Clare: Parish and Nation
5. William Hazlitt's Englishness
6. Charles Lamb and the Exotic
7. 'The Universal Nation': England and Empire in Thomas De Quincey's 'The English Mail-Coach'
Bibliography
Index