Placing and Displacing Romanticism

The essays collected in this volume all address the crucial current issues of 'place' and 'displacement', 'placing' and 'displacing' in Romantic period studies. These terms are used with dexterity and imagination, explored and interrogated in both their literal and figurative manifestations. Overall this volume of essays takes forward these seminal terms in contemporary criticism of Romantic writing in a series of fresh and subtle readings of texts and contexts, historical, philosophical, social, political and scientific. Familiar texts are revisited with new insight and unfamiliar texts are placed in meaningful contexts. Despite the claim that Romantic writing denies and evades history and the social tensions of its time, this volume shows how such writing is replete with both explicit and implicit contributions to the essential debates of the time. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in their field, combine the virtues of close textual reading with an informed awareness of the historical, political and social pressures of the Romantic period, encouraging a critical stance of historically engaged formalist critique.