bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epic
Authors: Tucker Herbert F.
Published: July 2017

That in Britain the ancient genre of epic flourished around the turn of the nineteenth century is one of Romanticism's better kept secrets. The obscurity of this development within received literary history proceeds from the same cause that makes the study of Romantic epic intriguing: the tension between individualist and collectivist impulses within modernity. Whether one looks to scope (epics are big), subject matter (epics include history), structure (epics prize unity), ethics (epics valorize heroism), or function (epics teach culture), the traditional grounds of the genre's prestige seem starkly at odds with most vectors of the modern that emerged at the juncture of the French and Industrial Revolutions. For, as everybody knows, the literature of that time sponsored lyrical intimacy, psychological idiosyncrasy, the fragmenting and hybridization of inherited forms and genres. Then was the momentous hour when anti‐heroic subjectivities and counter‐cultural agendas began to energize creative minds, much as they have done ever since. All true; and yet these individualizing considerations did not close the door against epic's summons to collectivity – they unlocked it. They help explain why the dialectical energies of Romanticism drove creative minds to receive the heritage of epic in so transformative a way, and to devote their major works to reconceptions so ambitiously radical.
Essay
Authors: Lee Debbie , Sanchez Rachel
Published: July 2017

The essay begins … with the discovery of the self.
F
errier,
S
usan
Authors: Peterson Katrina M.
Published: July 2017

Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1782–1854) could be classed among the forgotten women writers of Romanticism. Known as ‘the Scots Jane Austen’ and a friend of Sir Walter Scott, she wrote three well‐received and successful novels:
Marriage
(1818),
The Inheritance
(1824), and
Destiny
(1831). The anonymous publication of
Marriage
led some to attribute it to Scott himself, and it received praise from
Blackwood's
and Mrs Piozzi, among others. In contrast to many contemporaries, however, Ferrier all but disappeared from the critical and popular gaze during the twentieth century. She was increasingly ranked as a minor author in surveys of English literature despite her consistent readership throughout her own century. Scholars disagree over the rationale for her fall from favour, yet they acknowledge the acclaim she received in her lifetime, as well as the importance of Scottish representation in her work. This integration of Scottish manners, customs, and dialect certainly enhanced the popularity of her novels across the nineteenth century.
F
ox,
C
harles
J
ames
Authors: Simmons Clare A.
Published: July 2017

Charles James Fox (1749–1806), politician and orator, was the second son of Henry Fox, later first Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox; he was given the names Charles James because his mother was a direct descendant of a mistress of Charles II. All accounts describe him as a clever but overindulged child: for example, according to family tradition, when he was 14 and still at Eton, his father took him to Paris and paid for him to lose his virginity with a woman of experience. He entered Oxford University at the age of 15, but although he took classes in mathematics and classics he left without a degree. His main education seems to have come through his reading and through travel: while in his teens, he took a grand tour through France and Italy, where he met numerous political figures including Lafayette. He soon achieved a reputation for womanizing, gambling and ‐what was worse in British eyes – French style.
French Revolution, European Drama
Authors: Nielsen Wendy C.
Published: July 2017

The French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon transformed Europe and its inhabitants, and theatre narrated the life and afterlife of these changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The revolutionary period includes the 1780s, the decade before the French monarchy fell, as well as 1789 to 1799, when rebellion and war dominated European politics; the Napoleonic era, 1799 to 1815; and the July Revolution of 1830, culminating in the crowning of Louis‐Philippe (1773–1850) as constitutional monarch. Theatre sometimes documented the memorable events of the Revolution. A controlling aristocracy, a corrupt clergy, and an oppressive environment that silenced free speech led to the end of the Old Order(ancien régime). These issues lent themselves well to the stage when and if authorities allowed their expression.
G
odwin,
W
illiam
Authors: Chatterjee Ranita
Published: July 2017

William Godwin (1756–1836), English political philosopher, journalist, novelist, playwright, historian, diarist, biographer, and writer of children's literature, is one of the most significant radical thinkers of the British Romantic era. Born in the port town of Wisbech in North Cambridgeshire, a place with a strong history of political dissent, Godwin became a fearless advocate for equality, freedom of conscience, social justice, and gradual reform. Godwin's famous monumental work of political philosophy,
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness
(1793; Philp et al. 1993, vol. 3), and its fictional counterpart,
Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
(1794; Philp et al. 1992, vol. 3), offer rigorous critiques of the state, its laws, and its institutions, especially private property. Godwin regarded the institution of marriage as the most pernicious form of property ownership in its monopolizing enslavement of women. As a major proponent of anarchist philosophy, he influenced the leading Romantic poets and the early socialists Robert Owen, William Thompson, and Thomas Hodgskin. After reading the French philosophers D'Holbach, Helvétius, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet, Godwin abandoned his early career as a minister and turned to writing for a living. However, his Dissenting Calvinist family background and his education at the prestigious Hoxton Dissenting Academy from 1773 to 1778 marked all his works with a millennial optimism married with utilitarianism.
Gothic Chapbook
Authors: Potter Franz J.
Published: July 2017

The well‐known image of young Percy Bysshe Shelley clandestinely devouring forbidden tales of terror under the rose bushes at Sion House is a familiar, if not disquieting feature of literary history. Shelley's youthful predilection for ‘stories of haunted castles, bandits, murderers, and other grim personages – a most exciting and interesting food for boys’ minds’ was satisfied in the form of cheap Gothic chapbooks (Medwin 1847: 29–30). Notwithstanding the pleasure provided by these short tales of terror, adaptations of popular Gothic novels had the added benefit of being economical – sixpence or a shilling – or a penny a night from the circulating library which stocked dozens of thrilling and dangerous titles.
Grant, Anne
Authors: Lewes Darby
Published: July 2017

Anne Macvicar Grant (1755–1838), poet, essayist, memoirist, translator, correspondent, and mother of 12 children, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. Her body of work, begun upon the death of her husband, grew out of a need to support herself and her family. Respectable women of the time had very few ways in which to do so. In a society which offered independent women only menial jobs such as governess, domestic servant, factory worker, or prostitute, writing afforded them the opportunity to work from the security and safety of their homes: business could be conducted without the necessity to leave the security of the domestic sphere. All that one needed was something to write about – which could be a considerable difficulty, given that women were frequently discouraged from participation in any sort of public experience.
Hays, Mary
Authors: Wallace Miriam L.
Published: July 2017

Remembered now for her close friendship and association with Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays was a prominent writer on the situation of women in her own right. Born in 1759 or 1760, she lived until 1843, making her one of the few radical reformers who witnessed the revolutionary fervour of early Romanticism and its end. Hays's exploration of political philosophy and personal emotion through rational discussion is related to Enlightenment and dissenting traditions of self‐examination. They are, however, also familiar attributes of what we now recognize as ‘Romantic’ writers and thinkers. Hays created herself as a woman of letters through a concept of education relying upon an imbrication of feeling with rational argumentation that is arguably Romantic in nature.
Hemans, Felicia, Drama
Authors: Saglia Diego
Published: July 2017

The most successful, respected, and influential Romantic woman poet, Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) was also a playwright whose dramatic works are relevant both to the development of her own output and to the wider context of women's historical drama. Like many other contemporary women writers, she was a keen theatregoer. In a letter of October 1820 she described the electrifying experience of seeing Edmund Kean inRichard IIIandOthello, and confessed: ‘I felt as if I had never understood Shakspeare till then.’ In addition, she was personally acquainted with several outstanding contemporary dramatists such as Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford, and Henry Hart Milman.
Historical Novel
Authors: Lincoln Andrew
Published: July 2017

In Britain, the term ‘historical novel’ was attached to the title pages of fictional narratives (often French romances in translation) from at least the seventeenth century. In the Romantic period, largely as a result of the popularity of Walter Scott's novels, readers and critics began to think of the ‘historical novel’ as a distinct genre. Since then the form and value of the genre have been much debated. Scott's Waverley novels have been treated either as a norm or as a monopolizing presence that obscures the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. The most influential discussion, by the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukács, locates the origins of the historical novel in the turmoil generated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, which made ‘history a
mass experience’
(1962: 27). Lukács links progress with class struggle, and associates history with public events such as wars and uprisings; he finds in writers like Scott an ‘honest’ representation of this understanding of history. While some later critics have echoed Lukács's assumptions, others have seen them as tending to marginalize works by those writers (including many women) whose experience of history may seem repetitive and circular rather than progressive, and who may approach history through private subjects (such as the family saga) with little or no reference to public events (e.g., Wallace 2005). More recent work has begun to recover historical novels obscured by the singular focus on Scott. The field of historical fiction in this period is in fact so crowded and diverse that the following discussion is necessarily selective.
H
ofland,
B
arbara
Authors: Schierenbeck Daniel
Published: July 2017

Barbara Hofland (1770–1844) was one of the most prolific fiction writers of the Romantic era; she authored several books a year to a total of over 60 works. Though she published in a number of genres, she is best known as a children's writer who penned one‐volume tales characterized by their domestic realism and their promotion of social, moral, religious, and economic values. Hofland's tales are situated within a tradition of children's fiction by rationalist children's authors, like her friend Maria Edgeworth, as well as by Evangelicals such as Hannah More and Mary Sherwood. Indeed, Hofland's characters exemplify many middle‐class evangelical virtues – self‐control, moderation, and industry – and her tales likewise endorse a providential world view and the interconnection of economic and religious principles. Hofland's tales, however, are geared to older children and are not as overtly religious or didactic as those of her contemporaries. Furthermore, like another friend, Mary Mitford, Hofland wrote to support her family, so her generic choices and thematic concerns reflect her motivation to find marketable fictional forms available to female professional writers in early nineteenth‐century Britain. Though throughout her career she continued publishing in a variety of genres, in the moral, domestic tale Hofland found a form that was the most commercially successful and would not call into question her respectability or femininity. The marketability of her moral tales reflects the tastes of the Romantic‐era reading public and the role this genre plays as a bridge between didactic fiction and the later nineteenth‐century realist novel.
H
one,
W
illiam
Authors: Grimes Kyle
Published: July 2017

William Hone (1780–1842) is known in three different contexts. First, in December 1817 he successfully defended himself against charges of sedition and blasphemy and thus became an important figure in the struggle for a free press. Second, from late 1819 to 1821, Hone collaborated with George Cruikshank to produce a series of illustrated political satires that offered a radical critique of the Manchester Massacre and the Queen Caroline affair. Third, with his publication in the 1820s of several popular antiquarian texts, Hone established a reputation as an antiquarian editor and publisher.
H
ook,
T
heodore
Authors: Esterhammer Angela
Published: July 2017

Theodore Hook (1788–1841) was a successful dramatist during the first decade of the nineteenth century, a popular novelist during the 1820s, a journalist and editor periodically during his career, and a celebrated improviser throughout his life. The son of the popular composer and Vauxhall organist James Hook, Theodore attended school at Harrow at the same time as Byron. Growing up in his father's milieu – the theatres of London – during the early years of the nineteenth century, he wrote almost a dozen plays while in his teens and early twenties.
H
unt,
L
eigh, Prose
Authors: Strachan John
Published: July 2017

Though Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) lived well into the Victorian age, his years of fame and notoriety – and his period of greatest literary and political influence – ran from 1808, when he became editor of the
Examiner
, the mouthpiece of middle‐class radicalism, through the early years of the Regency, where his freedom‐of‐the‐press heroics landed him with two years in prison for daring to suggest that Prince George was a gluttonous, womanizing spendthrift, and into the late 1810s and early 1820s, when he was closely associated with Keats, Shelley, and Lord Byron, all of whom he knew when those poets were at the very height of their powers. In the Victorian period Hunt was known as an editor, poet, and belle lettrist and as the dramatist of A
Legend of Florence
(1840), one of the Queen's favourite plays (and, less happily, as the model for Dickens's charming but heartless sponger Harold Skimpole in
Bleak House
, 1852–3). In the Romantic period, however, when his reputation was decidedly more contentious, Hunt was notable as an avant‐garde poet, as a polemicist for what he saw as a new school of poetry, as a fearless radical journalist, and, not least, as a master of the familiar essay, with only ‘Elia’, Charles Lamb (whom he clearly influenced), to rival him in that capacity.
Hunt,Leigh, Theatre Criticism
Authors: Burwick Frederick
Published: July 2017

Before William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge made their own contributions to the tone, shape, and content of dramatic criticism, Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) had already transformed the theatre review into a new generic form. Up to that time, Hunt explained later in hisAutobiography, influence and quid pro quo favours dictated the content of the reviews (1870: 138–139). Impartiality, however, was not the only requisite. The critic also needed to assert a standard for both the play and the performance. Such a standard imposed higher expectations than could be achieved on the stage. Playwrights and performers could be applauded for their originality, insight, and power, but they must also be measured against the best models of theatrical tradition. Inevitably, then, theatre criticism ‘must of necessity blame as well as praise’ (1870: 121). Critical judgement, Hunt lamented, got in the way of spontaneous enjoyment: ‘Never, after I had taken critical pen in hand, did I pass the thoroughly delightful evenings at the playhouse which I had done when I went only to laugh or be moved’ (123). Among his several strategies for reasserting audience spontaneity, Hunt recalled unruly crowds and frequently scripted an audience response. As Alexander Pope demonstrated in his ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’, the interlocutor can provide an effective counter‐voice to an argument. As leverage against the critic's praise and blame, Hunt introduced an unnamed auditor: one seated next to him, who whispered his comments, or one who would shout from the gallery. By thus scripting voices from the audience, Hunt theatricalized his theatre reviews. He also appealed to his reader as a fellow playgoer, suggesting how ‘You’ might have responded to a scene. Hunt demonstrated early in his career a narrative skill for vivid verbal re‐enactments of a performance, and as he matured and developed as a critic he also drew skilfully on ‘then and now’ comparisons, inserting recollections of past performances into the current review.
H
unter,
J
ohn and
W
illiam
Authors: Sha Richard C.
Published: July 2017

Surgeon and comparative anatomist John Hunter (1728–93) was perhaps the most important vitalist thinker of the Romantic period in Britain. Vitalists believed that life was manifest in a vital force that was both dynamic and purposive, and because sexuality was so central to vitalism, Hunter wrote a good deal about it. He sought to understand the role that glands play in biological sex, and many of his experiments would prove crucial to the development of endocrinology (Jorgensen 1971: 7, 10). His students included his nephew Matthew Baillie; Astley Cooper, Keats's teacher; James Parkinson; John Abernethy; Henry Cline; and William Lawrence, surgeon and friend to the Shelleys. Among his patients were Byron (he examined Byron's club foot, and he recommended a special shoe), Benjamin Franklin, and David Hume (Moore 2005: 3).
K
ean,
E
dmund
Authors: Page Judith W.
Published: July 2017

Considered by many to be the greatest actor of the Romantic period, Edmund Kean remains something of an enigma: his early life and even his date of birth (generally thought to be either 1787 or 1789) are shrouded in mystery, and his career (consistently brilliant only from 1814 to 1819) ended with Kean broken and compromised by scandal. Kean's parentage is not entirely certain: his father was most likely also Edmund Kean and his mother was Anne Carey, a sometime actor, sometime prostitute. Various sources agree on certain facts: that Kean was born in London and died in Richmond on 15 May 1833; that he was illegitimate and from the lower classes; and that he began performing at an early age and was considered a dramatic prodigy. His debut at Drury Lane on 26 January 1814 was the major turning point in his life and a defining moment in theatre history. That performance and his long decline and final role as Othello in February 1833 framed not only Kean's career but a dynamic and volatile time in British theatre.
K
eats,
J
ohn,
P
oetry
Authors: Lau Beth
Published: July 2017

John Keats (1795–1821), long considered a major poet of the Romantic period, experimented with a variety of genres during his brief career. Those for which he is best known are the ode, sonnet, romance, ballad, and two unfinished epics (‘Hyperion’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion’), which can be classified as Romantic fragment poems. The three volumes Keats published in his lifetime make clear that distinctions among genres were important to him. His 1817
Poems
is divided into sections labelled ‘Poems’, ‘Epistles’, and ‘Sonnets’. The book also distinguishes between long and short poems in that it begins and ends with the longest works in the collection, ‘I stood tip‐toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, respectively. Keats's second publication,
Endymion
(1818), declares its genre in its subtitle, ‘A Poetic Romance’, and his final 1820 volume, like his first, begins and ends with his longest works (the narrative poems ‘Lamia,” Isabella’, and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ at the beginning and the epic fragment ‘Hyperion’ at the end), that enclose a middle section of shorter pieces labelled ‘Poems’.
K
elly,
F
rances
M
aria, and the
R
oyalty
T
heatre
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

Frances ‘Fanny’ Maria Kelly (1790–1882) was a Drury Lane actor and singer known for reviving the roles of Dorothy Jordan and for opening the Royalty Theatre in 1840. She was the niece of famed actor and composer Michael Kelly, with whom she worked for many years.
L
andor,
W
alter
S
avage,

I
maginary
C
onversations
Authors: Bradshaw Michael
Published: July 2017

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) published his
Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen
in five volumes between 1824 and 1829. It was with this long series of prose works that he first reached a wide readership;
Imaginary Conversations
kept him in the public attention, and remained his most popular achievement during his lifetime. Landor uses an elegantly informal prose style to investigate the relationships and dialogues of ideas between significant historical and cultural figures; he represents the beliefs, loves, crimes, and controversies of past eras, all observed with compassion but also a certain erudite detachment. At their best, the conversations are spirited and informed commentaries on pivotal moments in ‘great lives’, at which an idea is born which will have consequences in the material world.
L
ee,
H
arriet and
S
ophia
Authors: Heuer Imke
Published: July 2017

‘Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted to observe, that when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of “Tales,” … and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fictions of the day. Innumerable “Tales” of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style.’ With such self‐confidence, Harriet Lee (1757–1851) introduced the Standard Novels edition of
The Canterbury Tales
(1832), a collection of prose stories she originally published with her sister Sophia in five volumes between 1797 and 1805.
Literary Annual, Poetry
Authors: Thomas Sophie
Published: July 2017

Literary annuals enjoyed the peak of their enormous popularity in the 1820s and 1830s, and while some forms of ‘annual’ publishing persist today, their prominence and cultural impact in the later part of the Romantic period are too often overlooked. They were, first of all, luxury items: beautifully bound and presented volumes, which aimed to include original poems and essays by serious as well as popular writers. Produced once a year, they were gift‐books aimed at the Christmas market, when high‐volume sales would counter high production costs: they were a canny amalgamation of art, commerce, and feeling. Ackermann's
Forget Me Not
was the first to appear (in 1823), followed by the
Literary Souvenir
in 1825 (when it sold 6000 copies), but there were many others; the most popular, the
Keepsake
, began publishing in 1828 (its inaugural volume sold 15 000), and in 1829 boasted contributions from a surprising number of prominent poets, such as Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Southey, and Shelley (posthumously).
Lyrical Drama
Authors: Hoagwood Terence
Published: July 2017

The phrase ‘lyrical drama’ has several significantly different meanings. In the history of dramatic art, ‘lyrical drama’ is the form of ancient Greek plays including the tragedies of Aeschylus; these performances included action, dialogue, and music, including choral songs. In the courts of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James I, and in private houses during their reigns and afterward, masques and other dramatic performances containing lyrics included George Peele's
The Arraignment of Paris
and the popular dramas of William Shakespeare including
Romeo and Juliet
and
Love's Labour's Lost;
Ben Jonson wrote masques for performance at the court of Queen Anne (wife of James I); John Milton's
Comus
(1637) was subtitled
A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle;
and these are all dramas with lyrics and musical accompaniment. In the modern history of music, however, ‘lyrical drama’ designates opera, which often includes both recitative and lyrical singing, often in alternation, and often mingling spoken drama with singing, as in Henry Purcell's later operas and in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's
Seraglio
and
The Magic Flute
.
M
acaulay,
C
atharine
Authors: Simmons Clare A.
Published: July 2017

Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay (1731–91), later Graham, philosophical historian, was born at Wye, Kent on 2 April 1731, the second daughter among four children. Her parents were Elizabeth Wanley, who owned property in her own right, and John Sawbridge, who owned the Olantigh property at Wye; her grandfather Jacob Sawbridge had been heavily implicated in the South Sea Bubble investment scandal. Elizabeth Wanley Sawbridge died in childbirth when Catharine was two years old, and she and her sister Mary were educated privately at home. A voracious reader, she claimed in the Preface to the first volume of her
History
to have been inspired with a love for liberty in her childhood by histories of the Greek and Roman republics.
M
aginn,
W
illiam
Authors: Latané David E.
Published: July 2017

If one could somehow winkle all the unattributed contributions of William Maginn (1794–1842) out of the newspaper and magazine archives, they would fill a library. His unusual abilities included writing to deadline on one subject while carrying on a full conversation on a different topic; and his love of anonymity and pseudonyms means that the record of his authorship can only be partially discerned. Born in Cork in 1794, he was crammed by a schoolmaster father with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew while still a child, and enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of 11. After graduation he returned home to teach and then, after the death of his father, to head the family Classical academy, but was drawn into periodical writing, first in Cork and then for the
London Literary Gazette
and
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
. After adding a number of other languages to the Classical trio, he was awarded a doctorate in 1819 (still only 25 years old) and became known among his cronies as ‘The Doctor'.
M
aturin,
C
harles
R
obert
Authors: Morin Christina
Published: July 2017

An Irish Anglican clergyman by profession and novelist, playwright, and poet by necessity, Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824) is remembered today as the eccentric author of the Gothic masterpiece
Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820). He is also frequently mentioned alongside Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and Sydney Owenson (1768–1849) as one of the central figures of Irish Romantic fiction. Nevertheless, the majority of Maturin's works remain largely inaccessible to readers without access to a research library.
Melodrama, Origin and Development
Authors: Cox Philip
Published: July 2017

The development of melodrama can perhaps be seen as one of the Romantic period's most important legacies within the history of English drama. Although the arrival of the form within England has often been linked to Thomas Holcroft's production of a version of Guilbert de Pixérécourt's
Coelina ou l'Enfant du mystére (Coelina or the Child of mystery)
as
A Tale of Mystery
in 1802, melodrama – or melodramatic elements within plays – had been in evidence in British theatres for a number of years. As a quintessentially popular form that relied heavily on stage spectacle for its effects, the melodrama was frequently subject to sustained criticism concerning its literary and aesthetic merit; its popularity and ‘low’ subject matter were also often seen as potentially dangerous and subversive. Politically and ideologically, however, melodrama is ambiguously situated. Reading melodramas within their specific historical contexts, recent critical investigations have seen the dramatic mode as either inherently disruptive and transgressive or as a form that can be effortlessly co‐opted to the conservative cause. Indeed, it could be argued that the ideological ambiguities associated with melodrama account, in part, for its pervasive popularity and endurance, enabling it to represent conflicting ethical and political imperatives during a period of social transition.
M
ore,
H
annah, Prose
Authors: Vargo Lisa
Published: July 2017

The contributions of Hannah More (1745–1833) to fiction are marked with ironies. While she took a spirited stand against reading and writing novels, her most innovative works were fictions.
Village Politics
and the
Cheap Repository Tracts
contributed to the popularization of the short story.
Coelebs in Search of a Wife
brought a new reading public to the novel. Her writings on women's education make her ‘a key figure in the history of women's literacy’ (Pearson 1999: 88). In spite of these achievements, More's conservative views have overshadowed her importance. An understanding of her practice of fiction involves the recognition of how More's efforts to control what and how people read are undone by the libratory possibilities her fictional writings offer.
Music and Song, Drama
Authors: Schneider Matthew
Published: July 2017

Music and song were ubiquitous in Romantic‐era theatre. Throughout the period, the Restoration tradition of interspersing songs in spoken drama continued, and all actors ‐regardless of dramatic genre or character type – were expected to sing. Music and song were particularly prominent at the non‐patent or ‘illegitimate’ theatres, because orchestral or sung entertainments were believed to be exempt from the Theatrical Licensing Act's ban on spoken drama at any but the patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. The use of music to create ‘atmospheric’ emotional effects was also a defining characteristic of melodrama, which became the dominant mode of writing for the theatre after about 1800.
O
pie,
A
melia
Authors: Eberle Roxanne
Published: July 2017

Born in Norwich, Amelia Alderson Opie (1769–1853) died at the age of 84, two years after her final trip to London and a visit to the Great Exhibition in 1851. Her publications span several genres and three literary periods, dating from the end of the eighteenth century through over half of the next century. She authored at least three plays (written in the 1790s and no longer extant), seven novels (upon which her ‘Romantic’ reputation tends to rest), four volumes of poetry, five collections of tales (particularly successful during the ‘Victorian’ period), two didactic works, as well as poems and essays published in popular annuals and periodicals. She composed ballads and sang them with great effect, performed in at least one play and gave at least one political speech. An enthusiastic participant in an extraordinary range of cultural moments, she attended the English treason trials of 1794, married a well‐known portrait painter in 1798, visited France during the peace of 1802, and joined the Society of Friends in 1825, an act of public conversion that attracted much attention. She became a prominent Abolitionist activist, serving as Norwich's representative to the first International Anti‐Slavery Convention in 1849, where she was one of the few women participants represented in Benjamin Haydon's panoramic painting of the event.
Ottava Rima
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: July 2017

Romantic usages of
ottava rima
call into question the relation between epic and romance. The standard heroic measure of dactylic hexameter, used in Classical narrative verse from Homer through Virgil, gave way in the Christian era to the verse form of narrative romance known as
ottava rima
, eight lines of iambic pentameter rhymed abababcc. The stichic (or continuous) pattern of heroic verse thus gave way to a stanzaic pattern, divided into cantos rather than books. In this sense, the lyric element of the Old French
chansons de gest
, songs of heroic lineage or origin dating from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, crossed Aristotelian lines of distinction between lyric and narrative verse to change the form of story‐telling associated since Classical times with epic. The French
chansons
, preceding the lyrics of the troubadours at the dawn of French literary tradition, related legendary events from the age of Charlemagne during the conflicts between the Christian knights and the Moors and Saracens. Like the Old Spanish
Cantos de gesta
, the stories included elements of fantasy (giants, magic, monsters) suited to a courtly tradition of oral performance by minstrels. But whereas the chanson stanza consisted typically of ten lines, later adaptations of the form by the Italian poet Boccaccio trimmed the stanza down to eight lines, which then defined the form of epic poetry (reconceptualized as
romanzo)
for the next two centuries.
O
wenson,
S
ydney
Authors: Dabundo Laura
Published: July 2017

Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, aka the self‐styled ‘Wild Irish Girl’ (1776?‐1859), was a star of the literary circuit of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and a pioneer of the Irish Romantic novel. She courted fame personally; for her cause, her native land; and for her literature (both fiction and poetry). As she gained renown – both acclaim and infamy ‐she considerably helped to establish Ireland in the world of fiction and in the fiction of her world. Born, she claimed, on the Irish Sea between Ireland and England, of an impoverished Irish Roman Catholic actor father and an English Protestant mother who died very young, Sydney Owenson straddled two identities, and her works sought to present the Irish to the English and to the world, at the same time blurring the distinctions between them. At the same time, and often not as well lauded, she sought to bring attention to women in society and was in many ways a feminist before her time.
P
eacock,
T
homas
L
ove
Authors: Jones Steven E.
Published: July 2017

Though he published poetry and wrote a Victorian memoir of the Shelley circle, Thomas Love Peacock is best known to literary history for his Romantic‐period prose. His satirical essay
The Four Ages of Poetry
(1820) prompted Shelley's
A Defence of Poetry
(1821). Peacock also wrote six satirical or comic novels during the period:
Headlong Hall
(1815),
Melincourt
(1817),
Nightmare Abbey
(1818),
Maid Marian
(1822),
The Misfortunes of Elphin
(1829), and
Crotchet Castle
(1831). These contain witty dialogue, satirical commentary, and topical allusions to artists, poets, philosophers, and politicians. Their interpolated quotations and footnotes in various languages reveal Peacock's impressive learning. As their titles indicate, most of the novels take place in and around iconic country houses of one kind or another – hall, court, abbey, castle, or grange. Guests converse with one another in speeches punctuated by sometimes slapstick actions (leaping out of a tower when a cannon is fired) or comic songs. The narratives, in which type‐characters ride in carriages, walk, dine, drink, sing, and talk, and then drink and talk some more, read like vigorous verbalized cartoons,
saturae
, or mixed feasts at which nothing is sacred – except perhaps social life itself.
Philosophy, Politics, and Religion
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: July 2017

In
Past and Present
, Thomas Carlyle accused the previous half century – what we now know as the ‘Romantic’ age – of scepticism, religious dissent, and atheism; he claims that the period of ‘liberty and equality’ was also a ‘Period of Ignorance’ (Carlyle 1850: 168, 243). The cultural work of
Past and Present
was thus to repair the disintegrating effects of this ignorance with a renewed commitment to social cohesion. In the name of ‘God's justice', Carlyle's idealized captains of the world would inspire ‘noble loyalty in return for noble guidance', leading to a revived and re‐ordered national culture (ibid.: 275). Carlyle's account represented a predominant Victorian judgement on the Romantics; but even in this negative judgement, his account nevertheless illuminated some crucial aspects of Romantic prose writing on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and the politics attached to various configurations of the connection between those terms. For if the latter half of the nineteenth century sought to recover a lost set of spiritual values by combating spiritual ‘chaos’ with revived belief and superior spiritual ‘guidance', Romantic writers did not merely espouse atheism or scepticism – although this is certainly part of the late eighteenth‐century intellectual landscape (ibid.: 266, 275) – in addition, they questioned the degree to which a philosophical position on religion could be used to address political problems. On the one hand, in other words, it is possible for us to observe how Romantic writers fiercely pursued a position in relation to the sceptical epistemologies that they inherited from the earlier eighteenth century – either adopting them, modifying them, or contradicting them; these epistemological positions could occasionally be linked to political positions on the value or lack of value that inhered in religious belief as a basis for community. On the other hand, however, many prose writers of the period struggled against the more general idea – fundamental for Carlyle – that philosophy or religion should undergird a commitment to social cohesion. Rather than using philosophical or religious beliefs to advocate for communally shared values, Romantic prose writings frequently directed their inquiries to the political and aesthetic management of conflicting forces rather than to the disciplinary enforcement of uniformity.
P
ickersgill,
J
oshua
Authors: Heuer Imke
Published: July 2017

‘This production is founded partly on the story of a Novel called “The Three Brothers” published many years ago […] and partly on the
Faust
of the great Goethe.’ Thus Byron acknowledged Joshua Pickersgill's Gothic novel
The Three Brothers. A Romance
(1803) in a note to his fragmentary drama
The Deformed Transformed
(1824). Completed when Pickersgill was 21,
TTB
apparently remained his only literary production. Born around 1780 into a military family from Yorkshire, he joined the East India Company's service, became an ensign, and died of a fever in 1818.
Porter,Jane
Authors: McLean Thomas
Published: July 2017

Jane Porter's contribution to the development of the novel was often overlooked in twentieth‐century criticism. But Porter (1775–1850), following in the wake of contemporaries Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, has become the focus of much recent scholarship. Indeed, her novels are significant both to the sentimental and Gothic novels that precede them and to the historical novels that follow. Porter was born in Durham, spent part of her youth in Edinburgh, and lived most of her adult life in or near London. Walter Scott was an acquaintance in Edinburgh, and her adult circle included the novelist and historian Elizabeth Benger, the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, and the military hero Sir Sidney Smith. She lived with her mother and her sister Anna Maria (1778–1832), also a novelist, and remained close to her younger brother, the panoramist and traveller Sir Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842).
Prize Poems
Authors: Simpson Erik
Published: July 2017

Prize poems played two roles in the literary culture of the Romantic period. Schools and universities increased the number and visibility of English‐language poetry prizes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, publicizing them in ways that made the school prize poem a newly prominent genre in British publication. At the same time, poets – particularly poets who lacked access to the elite educational institutions that sponsored the most celebrated prizes – competed for new kinds of public prizes and wrote works that staged the dynamics of literary contests and their prize awards.
Prophecy
Authors: Goss Erin M.
Published: July 2017

Responding to the apocalyptic implications of the French Revolution, to changing interpretations of the biblical text, and to the surge in millenarianism that accompanied the turn of the century, late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century English culture was ripe for prophetic self‐election. Through the figure of the inspired prophet, Romantic poets announce their inheritance of the scriptural genre of Old Testament prophecy, adopting prophecy not primarily as predictive but rather as a public discourse that adjures its audience to see anew in order to effect a future that will be different from the present that prophecy describes.
Race and Miscegenation on Stage
Authors: Brewer William D.
Published: July 2017

During the British Romantic period the widespread fascination with foreign cultures and races led to the proliferation of theatrical productions featuring black, Moorish, American Indian, or Asian characters. Written by white authors for predominantly white audiences, these plays offered diverse representations of the racial Other, ranging from tragic heroes to comic retainers, from victims to avengers. In 1825, the expatriate American Ira Aldridge appeared at the Royal Coburg as Oroonoko in
The Revolt of Surinam, or A Slave's Revenge
, an adaptation of Thomas Southerne's
Oroonoko
(1696), and became the first black actor to receive top billing on a British stage. As the African Roscius’, Aldridge played numerous black parts in provincial theatres and whitened his skin to perform the roles of Macbeth, King Lear, and Shylock (Nussbaum 2003). Before Aldridge's English debut, characters such as the black servant Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaff's
The Padlock
(1768) and the enslaved African Prince Oroonoko were invariably played by white actors wearing blackface. Shakespeare's Othello and Edward Young's Zanga, the Iago‐like villain of
The Revenge
(1721), inspired a series of charismatic, noble, passionate, and violent African characters who reflected English anxieties about slavery and empire, and the popularity of Mungo prompted many other blackface roles involving servants or slaves speaking in dialect. By the early nineteenth‐century the intensification of public concern over foreign, particularly West Indian, immigration to England and racial intermixing made dramatic portrayals of miscegenation increasingly controversial.
R
obinson,
H
enry
C
rabb
Authors: Stelzig Eugene
Published: July 2017

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) was an aspiring man of letters who during his long life cultivated the acquaintance of most of the leading writers in Germany and England during the first half of the nineteenth century. The gregarious bachelor who spent the first five years of the century in Germany, becoming more familiar with its language, literature, and philosophy than any other Englishman of his generation, also came to serve as a channel of communication between German and English Romanticism. He kept a diary from 1811 to several days before his death, and late in life also wrote his reminiscences. His papers at Dr Williams's Library include 29 volumes of diary, 32 volumes of travel journals, 4 volumes of reminiscences, and more than 30 volumes of his correspondence (The Crabb Robinson Project). Robinson is not only an important source of information about many of the leading writers of his time, but also an accomplished life writer (Stelzig 2010). While only selections of his manuscripts and correspondence have been published (see the volumes edited by Sadler and Morley), the Robinson archive may constitute the most extensive autobiographical record of any nineteenth‐century English writer.
Robinson,Mary, Drama
Authors: Brewer William D.
Published: July 2017

Trained by the great actor and dramaturge David Garrick and cast in a variety of tragic and comic roles by the playwright and theatre manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson (1758?–1800) became a popular and well‐compensated Drury Lane actress. She subsequently achieved literary fame as a novelist, poet, polemicist, and essayist. Her career as a playwright was, however, marred by negative reviews, audiences’ disruption of her afterpieceNobody(performed 1794), and the reluctance of theatre managers to produce her plays. Robinson blamed the failure ofNobody, which starred the most celebrated comedienne of the Romantic period, Dorothy Jordan, on the vindictiveness of the patrician female gamesters who were the targets of her satire. Her tragedyThe Sicilian Lover(1796) languished in ‘that pandemonium ofgeniusanddulness, theprompter'scloset’(Robinson 1806) and was never performed. Robinson had the play printed, but it sold only 32 copies in four months, and she ended up owing her publishers £22 (Fergus & Thaddeus 1987). Her comic operaKate of Aberdeen, written in the early 1790s, has been lost, and she published only the songs fromThe Lucky Escape(performed 1778) and the prologue and epilogue toNobody. Licensing manuscripts ofThe Lucky EscapeandNobodyhave been preserved, however, in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and have been recently reproduced in volume 8 ofThe Works of Mary Robinson(2010).
R
obinson,
M
ary, Poetry
Authors: Fay Elizabeth A.
Published: July 2017

Critics have largely agreed in reading Mary Robinson as her public did: the literal body mapped onto the public persona, and both mapped onto and revealed through the published works. This privileging of the performative aspects of Robinson's public career is simultaneously dynamic (working the mobile and mutating interrelations between an ever‐shifting persona, multiple personae, public behaviour, and publications as she made these available to a celebrity‐hungry leisured class) and reductive (transforming her into a body to be read, as nothing more than the performance that is the text). In such a reading, her early ascent and the fast pace of her life are foreshortened into a fad as ephemeral as the fashionable behaviours she participated in – sensibility, Della Cruscanism, park parading, costuming. Although Robinson's social ascent was grounded in her multiply layered performances, projections of the identity she wanted others to buy literally and imaginatively, she was far more accomplished as a writer than the label of performance artist would imply, even if that label most accurately describes the arc of her career. The artistic output of her 42 years is prodigious, increasing in quantity as she needed income, but also in mastery. This entry will examine the development, range, and achievement of her poetry in order to show why both her readership and contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed her to be one of the major poets of the day.