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What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about “progress” and “perfection”? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive political associations in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement—increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury—they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But Romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley’s plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith’s motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The “majestic edifices” of Wordsworth’s imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are “republican or pious,” not to mention the recalcitrant “enthusiast” who is the poet himself.

John Keats and Romantic Scotland is the first full-length study of John Keats and the literature, landscape, history, and culture of Scotland. Linking all thirteen chapters is Keats’s epic walk through Scotland in summer 1818, and the book ranges across topics such as Keats in relation to Robert Burns and Walter Scott, highland tours, mountaineering, myth, medievalism, poetical purposes, health, and Scottish painters. The book offers a thorough reassessment of Keats as he foot-stepped his way from Burns’s Dumfries to Loch Lomond, Oban, Mull, Iona, and Inverness, and offers eye-opening new readings of the poems and letters that he wrote while on the road.

1848 was a pivotal moment not only in Europe but in much of the rest of the world too. Marx’s scornful dismissal of the revolutions created a historiography of 1848 that has persisted for more than 150 years. Serial Revolutions 1848 shows how, far from being the failure that Karl Marx claimed them to be, the revolutions of 1848 were a powerful response to the political failure of governments across Europe to care for their people. Crucially, this revolutionary response was the result of new forms of representation and mediation: until the ragged and the angry could see themselves represented, and represented as a serial phenomenon, such a political consciousness was impossible. By the 1840s, the developments in printing, transport, and distribution discussed in Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2020) had made the social visible in an unprecedented way. This print revolution led to a series of real and bloody revolutions in the streets of European cities. The revolutionaries of 1848 had the temerity to imagine universal human rights and a world in which everyone could live without fear, hunger, or humiliation. If looked at like this, the events of 1848 do not seem such ‘poor incidents’, as Marx described them, nor such an embarrassing failure after all. Returning to 1848, we can choose to look back on that ‘springtime of the peoples’ as a moment of tragi-comic failure, obliterated by the brutalities that followed, or we can look again, and see it as a proleptic moment of stored potential, an extraordinary series of events that generated long-distance and sustainable ideas about global citizenship, international cooperation and a shared and common humanity which have not yet been fully understood or realized.