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The book describes and analyses the condition of autobiographical writing in Britain during the Romantic period. As well as chapter-length studies of major autobiographical works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, it provides a wide-ranging account of the rapidly expanding field of published self-writing during the period. The book also demonstrates that the category of ‘autobiography’ emerged in the literary public sphere during these years, and that instances of autobiographical writing need to be read in relation to the conditions under which they were circulated and read. Part I deals with the emergence of a sense of genre: the idea of autobiography, as it made its way into the literary environment. Part II examines how the anxieties and restrictions attendant upon the idea of self-writing are reflected in published texts, which present themselves as autobiographies. Part III focuses on readings of autobiographical works, exploring some examples of their representations of the situation of self-writing, and considering what sort of readings are involved when we interpret a given text as an autobiography. Overall, the book emphasizes the uncertain and contested transactions between Romantic autobiographical writing and the literary public sphere.

Byron’s connection with Italy is one of the most familiar facts about British Romanticism. A considerable portion of his legend is linked to his many pronouncements about the country (where he lived between 1816 and 1823), its history, culture and people, as well as about his own experiences in Italy and among Italians. Offering new insights into Byron’s relation to Italy, this volume is concerned with the real, historical ‘Anglo-Italian’ Byron, and his ‘almost Italianness’ as a poet. Its essays bring together different critical perspectives to take the pulse of current debates and open up new lines of enquiry into this crucial theme in Byron Studies and Romantic-era Studies more widely. In doing so, they explore how Byron’s being in Italy affected his sense of his own individual identity and of the labile nature of the self. It affected his politics – both in theory and in practice – and, of course, his whole development as a writer of lyrics, dramas, narratives, satires and letters. Moreover, the essays show how Italy affected, changed and informed Byron’s thinking about matters far beyond Italy itself. As the book shows, the poet’s relation to the country and its culture was complicated by a pervasive dialectic between familiarity and distance, and thus neither stable nor consistent. For this reason, among many others, the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ remains an endless source of intellectual, literary, historical and existential fascination.

This book describes Staël's life in exile as the crucial experience shaping her literary and political identity. It relates her inner, private exile as an oppressed and thwarted woman in a society with restrictive and conventional norms of decorum to the outer, public exile of one who suffered banishment as a result of daring to criticize authoritarian regimes. This tension made her a living paradox in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A member of the downtrodden sisterhood who longed to be politically active, but knew that her sex excluded her in practical terms from the world stage, she was torn between the need to appear a ‘proper lady’ and the desire to write in socially and intellectually daring (or ‘male’) ways. Yet although she was regarded by her political masters as simply too dangerous to be tolerated in France, her subversive writings — particularly the novels Delphine and Corinne and the Romantic digest De l'Allemagne — made her appear as much a threat outside her homeland as within it, an irritant to despotic political regimes, and a cosmopolitan who lived, socialized, and observed wherever she went (England, Germany, Italy, and Russia) and afterwards wrote to explosive effect about the experience. Exile served only to give this European celebrity, the friend of statesmen and soldiers as well as of literary figures like Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Fanny Burney, a public voice that infuriated her political antagonists, increasing her determination to escape entrapment and proclaim the virtues of freedom and enlightenment wherever she went.

Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle‐18^th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has arisen in the context of the articulation of a modernity distinguished either by its full‐scale rejection of classical precedents or by its embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the Roman past for Romantic writers, and transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book asserts the centrality of Rome in a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti‐democratic, or “right royal.” By exposing how Roman references help structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacts fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book initiates a major overhaul in how we understand the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.

Taking as examples the lives of creative individuals through history, this book considers the nature of creativity and genius from a psychological standpoint. Eleven chapters, contributed by leading researchers, span the range of approaches used to understand the subject. A discussion of heredity considers the extent to which genes play a part in giftedness. The importance of social context in defining and acknowledging creativity is explored. Several chapters look at training and skill development in exceptional individuals, and a number of contributions scrutinize the links between creativity, temperament, and mental health. Mozart's precocity, Byron's mania, the personalities of the Italian Renaissance painters, and the psychoses of many celebrated writers are all discussed.

This book examines the significance of what Victor Hugo called the “Greece of Byron” or modern Greece in English and American literature. Although ancient Greece, Hugo's “Greece of Homer”, and modern Greece occupy the same geographical space on the map, they are two distinct entities in the Western imagination. Modern Greece, constructed by the early 19th-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been “haunted, holy ground” in literature for almost two centuries. This book analyzes how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of “Greece” to suit changing eras.

Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: Romanticism’s future-oriented poetics. This book explores the epistemological uncertainties that arise from the sense of an unknowable futurity at the outset of the nineteenth century. It situates that uncertainty in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity’s Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—“what might will have been”—the imagining of the historical present as opening up a range of interpretive and dramatic possibilities, whereby the present becomes a process that will always remain incomplete. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity’s Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age, and it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetic grammar of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical dimensions of the present when faced with the temporal situation of modernity.

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, the book focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. The introduction analyses the persistence of the Romantic. Chapter 1 dwells on images of ‘air’, using these to understand the efforts of a number of 20th-century poets to ‘sustain’ Romanticism or forms of it. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Yeats and Eliot, respectively, the latter apparently shunning the Romantic, the former seeming to embrace it, but both responding with acute subtlety and individuality to the Romantic bequest. Chapter 4 argues that Wallace Stevens's ‘Esthétique du Mal’ should be read as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. Chapter 5 discusses the work of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complex response of both poets to the Romantic, Auden complicated in his post-Romantic attitudes, Spender daring in his attempts to renew a Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic age. Chapter 6 investigates the response of a range of contemporary poets from or associated with Northern Ireland, including Heaney, Kavanagh, Mahon, and Carson, to Romantic poetry. Chapter 7 sustains the Irish connection, discussing Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics, especially in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’. And Chapter 8 focuses on Geoffrey Hill's tense and tensed relations with Romantic poetry, and on Roy Fisher's sense of being a ‘gutted Romantic’, in order to illustrate two diverse ways of being post-Romantic in contemporary culture.