An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age

For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion''s two-part structure presents forty-two essays on major topics by leading international experts cross-referenced to an extensive alphabetical section covering all the principal figures events and movements in the broad culture of the period. Aimed at students and general readers as well as scholars the essays constitute an accessible pluralistic and modern social history of the epoch; the alphabetical entries can either be used alongside them for deeper information on specific subjects or as a free-standing reference tool. The volume as a whole embraces both high and low culture and explores its subject across the whole breadth of England Scotland Wales and Ireland.The book''s multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms-its meaning for painting music design architecture and above all literature-and as a historical epoch of ''revolutionary'' transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society. In this period Wedgwood turned taste into a commercial enterprise Pierce Egan took Britain by storm with his sensational accounts of low-life in the capital and Mary Shelley created in Frankenstein one of the enduring myths of scientific advance. The Companion revitalizes canonical Romantic figures in the context of the historical events political and linguistic debates commercial pressures and plebeian subcultures of their day as well as bringing back into historical focus individuals and events whose impact has often been muffled or forgotten.With over 100 integrated illustrations bibliographies accompanying all the major essays and an index to Part 1 this is the most comprehensive volume of its kind offering a unique breadth of information to scholars and students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture literature and history.EDITORIAL BOARD:John Brewer (University of California) Marilyn Butler (Exeter College University of Oxford)James Chandler (University of Chicago)Jerome J. McGann ( University of Virginia Charlottesville)Mark Philp (Oriel College Oxford)Robert Webb (University of Maryland)