Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre

by David Duff

Overview

The revival of romance as a literary form and the imaginative impact of the French Revolution are acknowledged influences on English Romanticism, but their relationship has rarely been addressed. In this innovative study of the transformations of a genre, David Duff examines the paradox whereby the unstable visionary world of romance came to provide an apt language for the representation of revolution, and how the literary form was itself politicized in the period. Drawing on an extensive range of textual and visual sources, the author traces the ambivalent ideological overtones of the chivalric revival, the polemical appropriation of the language of romance in the "pamphlet war" of the 1790s, and the emergence of a radical cult of chivalry among the Hunt-Shelley circle in 1815-17.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521021104
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2005
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #7
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The French Revolution and the politics of romance; 2. Romance and revolution in Queen Mab; 3. Sir Guyon de Shelley and friends: new light on the chivalric revival; 4. The right road to paradise: Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City; Notes; Select Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...will be savoured by those who have an interest in the literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic." Notes and Queries

"...[a] thoroughly researched, lucidly written book..." C. Walker, Choice

"The best parts of David Duff's book are wonderfully informative and should make a real difference to the current round of debates about Romanticism as a historical and cultural formation." William Keach, Modern Philology

From the Publisher