Remediating the 1820s

by Jon Mee (Editor), Matthew Sangster (Editor)

Overview

The 1820s has commonly been overlooked in literary and cultural studies, seen as a barren interregnum between the achievements of Romanticism and the Victorian era proper, or, at best, as a time of transition bridging two major periods of cultural production. This volume contends that the innovations, fears and experiments of the 1820s are both of considerable interest in themselves and vital for comprehending how Victorian and Romantic culture wrote and visioned one another into being. Remediating the 1820s explores the decade’s own sense of itself as a period of expansion in terms of the projection of British power and knowledge, but also its tremendous uncertainty about where this left traditional identities and moral values. In doing so, the collection articulates how specific novelties, transformations and anxieties of the time remediated and remade culture and society in manners that continue powerfully to resonate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474493284
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2024
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, India and the United States. His books include Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003), Conversable Words: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1832 (Oxford, 2011) and Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2016). He co-edited The Spirit of Controversy, a selection of William Hazlitt's essays, with James Grande for Oxford World’s Classics in 2021. He is currently completing a book on cultural networks in the Industrial Revolution for the University of Chicago Press, due to be published in Fall 2023. The research for the book was supported by a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. He has also co-edited another collection of essays with Matthew Sangster: Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (Cambridge, 2022).

Matthew Sangster is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. His first book, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He has published widely on authorship, institutions, readers and urban life in the Romantic period. He co-edited a special issue of Romanticism on the Net on Robert Southey (with Tim Fulford; 2017) and edited the Romantic Circles volume David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism (2022). Currently, he is collaborating on two major AHRC-funded projects exploring the history of reading using neglected library records: Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic and Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers' Registers. His next monograph will be An Introduction to Fantasy.

Table of Contents

List of FiguresPrefaceJon Mee and Matthew Sangster

Notes on ContributorsIntroductionJon Mee and Matthew Sangster

Chronology of the 1820s

Truth, Fiction and Breaking News: Theodore Hook and the Poyais SpeculationAngela EsterhammerThe Surfaces of History: Scott’s Turn, 1820 Ian DuncanKeyword: PowerJon MeeKeyword: DiffusionMatthew SangsterFeeding the 1820s: Bread, Beer and AnxietyLindsay Middleton Light and Darkness: The Magic Lantern at the Dawn of MediaPhillip RobertsKeyword: PerformanceJon MeeKeyword: SurveillancePorscha FermanisPaul Pry and Elizabeth Fry: Inspection and Spectatorship in the Social Theatre of the 1820sSara LodgeRegional News in ‘Peacetime’: The Dumfries and Galloway Courier in the 1820sGerard Lee McKeeverKeyword: LiberalJohn GardnerKeyword: EmigrationPorscha Fermanis(Re)settling Poetry: The Culture of Reprinting and the Poetics of Emigration in the 1820s Southern Settler ColoniesLara Atkin‘Innovation and Irregularity’: Religion, Poetry and Song in the 1820sJames GrandeKeyword: March of IntellectMatthew SangsterKeyword: DoubtDavid StewartThe Decade of the DialogueTim FulfordButterfly Books and Gilded Flies: Poetry and the AnnualClara Dawson‘Still but an Essayist’: Carlyle’s Early Essays and Late-Romantic Periodical CultureTom Toremans

Editorial Reviews

A splendidly multifaceted volume, Remediating the 1820s maps a darkly self-conscious yet exuberant decade full of newly developing media – visual, theatrical, periodical, musical, literary – that would produce far-reaching cultural and political change. The contributors, both leading and emerging scholars, make this collection powerful in content and truly innovative in form.

Jon Klancher