Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 4/9/2009
EAN 9780521880121, ISBN10: 0521880122

Hardcover, 332 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

From the ballad-seller to the Highland bard, from 'pot-house politics' to the language of low and rustic life, the writers and artists of the British Romantic period drew eclectic inspiration from the realm of plebeian experience, even as they helped to constitute the field of popular culture as a new object of polite consumption. Representing the work of leading scholars from both Britain and North America, Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland offers a series of fascinating insights into changing representations of 'the people', while demonstrating at the same time a unifying commitment to rethinking some of the fundamental categories that have shaped our view of the Romantic period. Addressing a series of key themes, including the ballad revival, popular politics, urbanization, and literary canon-formation, the volume also contains a substantial introductory essay, which provides a wide-ranging theoretical and historical overview of the subject.

Part I. Introduction
1. What is the people? Philip Connell and Nigel Leask
Part II. Ballad Poetry and Popular Song
2. 'A degrading species of Alchymy'
ballad poetics, oral tradition and the meanings of popular culture Nigel Leask
3. Refiguring the popular in Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry Leith Davis
4. 'An individual flowering on a common stem'
melody, performance and national song Kirsteen McCue
Part III. Politics and the People
5. Rus in Urbe John Barrell
6. The 'sinking down' of Jacobinism and the rise of the counter-revolutionary man of letters Kevin Gilmartin
7. Shelley's Mask of Anarchy and the visual iconography of female distress Ian Haywood
Part IV. The Urban Experience
8. Popularizing the public
Robert Chambers and the rewriting of the antiquarian city Ina Ferris
9. Keats, popular culture and the sociability of theatre Gillian Russell
10. A world within walls
Haydon, The Mock Election and debtors' prisons Greg Dart
Part V. Canon-Formation and the Common Reader
11. Every-day poetry
William Hone, popular antiquarianism, and the literary anthology Mina Gorji
12. How to popularize Wordsworth Philip Connell.

Review of the hardback: '... this volume provides a valuable overview of an important sub-area of modern Romantic studies, along with diverse specialised studies from which readers are bound to select those of particular interest to themselves. Elegantly produced, as one would expect from Cambridge University Press, the collection has been tightly edited by Connell and Leask and should be an important resource for scholars and postgraduates for years to come.' Literature and History