Jon Mee

a reader

Romanticism and revolution

Thomas Keymer

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the Lake and Cockney schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830

A lively and accessible introduction for general readers, students, teachers, and academics.

The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens

Dangerous Enthusiasm considers Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's well-received study meets the challenge byinvestigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. He traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diversecurrents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by a wealth of original research which will be of interest to historians and literary critics alike. Blake emerges from these pages as a 'bricoleur' who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study. "Mee....places Blake well and correctly...Dangerous Enthusiasm will do much to take Blake out of the somewhat attenuated discourse of analytic academicism and to put his back in a credible place.' 'a general, incontestable conclusion that, whatever their personal relations, Blake's political opinions, expressed in both his writings and his engravings, were much more Paineite than has ever been previously appreciated. Here in these pages Paine grows in stature, with the eager Blake at his side,,, [a] splendid volume...'

William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s

Dangerous Enthusiasm

This study looks at the way writers in the Romantic period, both canonical and popular, attempted to situate themselves in relation to enthusiasm, frequently craving the idea of its therapeutic power, but often also seeking to distinguish their writing from what many regarded as its destructive and pathological power.

Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period

Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation

Around 1700 a new commercial society was emerging that thought of its values as the product of exchanges between citizens. A welter of publications-periodical essays, novels, and poetry-enjoined the virtues of conversation and were enthusiastically discussed in book clubs and literary societies, creating their own conversable worlds.

Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830

Conversable Worlds

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

David Fallon

Romanticism and Revolution: A Readerpresents an anthology of the key texts that both defined the debate over the French Revolution during the 1790s and influenced the Romantic authors. Presents readings chronologically to allow readers to experience the unfolding of the debate as it occurred in the 1790s Provides an accessible and in-depth sampling of the major contributors to the Revolution debate, from Price, Burke, and Paine to Wollstonecraft and Godwin

A Reader

Romanticism and Revolution

John Keats

Keats's letters are 'the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet' (T. S. Eliot). This new edition revises and updates Robert Gittings's selection and includes 170 letters, a new introduction and notes, list of correspondents and full index

Selected Letters

John Barrell

The trial of Thomas Hardy for high treason (1794).

Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792-1794

Sarah Haggarty

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is William Blake's best-known work, containing such familiar poems as 'London', 'Sick Rose' and 'The Tyger'. Evolving over the author's lifetime, the collection was printed by Blake himself on his own press. This Reader's Guide: • explains the unique development of Songs as an illuminated book • considers the earliest reactions to the text during Blake's lifetime, and his gathering posthumous reputation in the nineteenth century • explores modern critical approaches and recent debates • discusses key topics that have been of abiding interest to critics, including the relationship between text and image in Blake's 'composite art'. Insightful and stimulating, this introductory guide is an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking to navigate their way through the mass of criticism surrounding Blake's most widely-studied work.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Reveals the development of the idea of 'the people' through print and publicity in 1790s London. This title will also be available as Open Access.

The Laurel of Liberty

Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s

Josephine McDonagh

Colin Jones

A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of Dickens’s most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

Jon Mee

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