Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle

by Jeffrey N. Cox

Overview

Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of "second generation" Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the "Cockney School." Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others. This book not only demonstrates convincingly that a "Cockney School" existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521631006
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/13/1999
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #31
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; or, the visionary company, INC.; 1. The 'Cockney School' attacks: or the anti-romantic ideology; 2. The Hunt era; 3. John Keats, coterie poet; 4. Staging hope: genre, myth and ideology in the dramas of the Hunt circle; 5. Cockney classicism: history with footnotes; 6. Final reckonings: Keats and Shelley on the wealth of the imagination.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This first detailed investigation of a unique literary group is warmly recommended to serious students of Romanticism." Choice

"Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School is,., a groundbreaking study of the relationships, ideological commitments, and cultural productions of the second generation of English Romantics. Cox's book helps us to reassess Leigh Hunt's achievements as poet, editor, and the leader of one of the most important coteries in literary history." William D. Brewer, South Atlantic Review

"...meticulously researched and beautifully written,...[Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School] intergrates the culture of the late-Romantic writers clearly and concretely into the social and political history of the late Romantic period...a wonderful book." European Romantic Review

"Cox's introductory dismantling of the "Cockney School" polemic is thorough and persuasive...This is primary scholarship at its best..." Linda Dowling, Studies in English Literature

"Cox makes an impressive and...successful attempt to present the Hunt circle as 'a site for cultural production'..." Robert M. Ryan, The Wordsworth Circle

"...thorough and persuasive. This is a primary scholarship at its best, giving even to such routine acivities as manuscript circulation the purpose, as Cox says in a moment of typical eloquence, of creating "on the page for the reader the generosity, the camaraderie, the collective inquiry, the communal celebration of life that the group offered as the ground for a new society" (p. 81)." SEL

"Cox's well informed and instructive study of Hunt's "Cockney" circle, its writing,life,and times, tells an important story about romantic sociability and collective enterprise. Theresa M. Kelley South Centeral Review

Editorial Reviews

"This first detailed investigation of a unique literary group is warmly recommended to serious students of Romanticism." Choice

"Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School is,., a groundbreaking study of the relationships, ideological commitments, and cultural productions of the second generation of English Romantics. Cox's book helps us to reassess Leigh Hunt's achievements as poet, editor, and the leader of one of the most important coteries in literary history." William D. Brewer, South Atlantic Review

"...meticulously researched and beautifully written,...[Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School] intergrates the culture of the late-Romantic writers clearly and concretely into the social and political history of the late Romantic period...a wonderful book." European Romantic Review

"Cox's introductory dismantling of the "Cockney School" polemic is thorough and persuasive...This is primary scholarship at its best..." Linda Dowling, Studies in English Literature

"Cox makes an impressive and...successful attempt to present the Hunt circle as 'a site for cultural production'..." Robert M. Ryan, The Wordsworth Circle

"...thorough and persuasive. This is a primary scholarship at its best, giving even to such routine acivities as manuscript circulation the purpose, as Cox says in a moment of typical eloquence, of creating "on the page for the reader the generosity, the camaraderie, the collective inquiry, the communal celebration of life that the group offered as the ground for a new society" (p. 81)." SEL

"Cox's well informed and instructive study of Hunt's "Cockney" circle, its writing,life,and times, tells an important story about romantic sociability and collective enterprise. Theresa M. Kelley South Centeral Review

From the Publisher