Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland

by Edited by Philip Connell , Nigel Leask

• ISBN13: 9780521880121
• ISBN10: 0521880122
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

From the ballad-seller to the Highland bard, from 'pot-house politics' to the language of low and rustic life, the writers and artists of the British Romantic period drew eclectic inspiration from the realm of plebeian experience, even as they helped to constitute the field of popular culture as a new object of polite consumption. Representing the work of leading scholars from both Britain and North America, Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland offers a series of fascinating insights into changing representations of 'the people', while demonstrating at the same time a unifying commitment to rethinking some of the fundamental categories that have shaped our view of the Romantic period. Addressing a series of key themes, including the ballad revival, popular politics, urbanization, and literary canon-formation, the volume also contains a substantial introductory essay, which provides a wide-ranging theoretical and historical overview of the subject.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Notes on contributors	p. x
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
What is the people?	p. 3
Ballad Poetry and Popular Song	p. 49
'A degrading species of Alchymy': ballad poetics, oral tradition, and the meanings of popular culture	p. 51
Refiguring the popular in Charlotte Brooke's	p. 72
'An individual flowering on a common stem': melody, performance, and national song	p. 88
Politics and the People	p. 107
Rus in urbe	p. 109
The 'sinking down' of Jacobinism and the rise of the counter-revolutionary man of letters	p. 128
Shelley's Mask of Anarchy and the visual iconography of female distress	p. 148
The Urban Experience	p. 175
Popularizing the public: Robert Chambers and the rewriting of the antiquarian city	p. 177
Keats, popular culture, and the sociability of theatre	p. 194
A world within walls: Haydon, The Mock Election, and 1820s debtors' prisons	p. 214
Canon-Formation and the Common Reader	p. 237
Every-day poetry: William Hone, popular antiquarianism, and the literary anthology	p. 239
How to popularize Wordsworth	p. 262
Bibliography	p. 283
Index	p. 307
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