Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition

by Anne Janowitz

Overview

This book examines the legacy of Romantic poetics in the poetry produced in political movements during the nineteenth century. It argues that a communitarian tradition of poetry extending from the 1790s to William Morris in the 1890s learned from and incorporated elements of Romantic lyricism, and produced an ongoing and self-conscious tradition of radical poetics. The book includes new readings of familiar Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Shelley, and provides case studies of relatively unknown Chartist and Republican poets such as Ernest Jones and W.J. Linton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521572590
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/06/1998
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #30
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Romantic studies as a unified field; Part I. A Dialectic of Romanticism: 1. The communitarian lyric in the dialectic of Romanticism; 2. Ballad, lyrical ballad, lyric; 3. The sun and the tree: lyrics of liberty; Part II. Interventionist Poetics in the Tradition of Romanticism: 4. Allen Davenport on the threshold of Chartism; 5. The forms of Chartist poetry and poetics: 1838–46; 6. Labour's laureates: Allen Davenport, Thomas Cooper, and Ernest Jones in 1846; 7. W. J. Linton and William Morris: Republican and Socialist poetics; Conclusion; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...a worthy addition to the Cambridge series....all readers at the upper-division undergraduate level and above will benefit from Janowitz's discussions of noncanonical Romantic poets." Choice

"Janowitz's welcome and impressive study carefully explores the tension between individualism and communitarianism in a wide range of Romantic and Victorian poetry, opening with Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and closing with William Morris's The Pilgrims of Hope." Nineteenth-Century Literature

"This is a rich book, a mine of information and a model of sensitive historical recovery, and it joins the other revisions of our understanding of radical politics in Britain that have given the once disenfranchised and disinherited a lasting claim oun our understanding." Albion

"...Far more than just another excursus on proletarian poetry." Linda Dowling Studies in English Literature

From the Publisher