One of the major aesthetic and philosophical frameworks that has been used to represent and think about the modern environmental crisis is the sublime. This chapter traces how a tradition of the sublime traceable directly to Romantic literature and culture has been used to conceptualize both the forms of nature that we should cherish, such as particular landscapes, and the forms of nature that we should shrink from, such as extreme weather events. The chapter also addresses how in the twenty-first century the sublime, and specifically a ‘Romantic sublime’ based mainly on Kant’s writings, has been condemned as an aesthetic that assumes a distance between human and nonhuman, and which creates a false impression that humans can transcend or solve the environmental crisis. Finally, the chapter considers whether a Romantic eco-sublime might still have a useful role in helping us to think about the nonhuman world and our relationship with it in a time of crisis.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

Chapter three explores how Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings responded to and engaged with larger questions surrounding birdsong, speech and poetry. While Coleridge throughout his life brooded over metaphysical arguments regarding ‘the one life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’, 1795), Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are filled with close, detailed descriptions of birds and their songs that are neither assimilated to nor inhibited by any overarching theory regarding the sentience of other creatures and our human relation to them. As he responded to his sister’s lively observations and the philosophical arguments in which he found his friend so deeply embroiled, William Wordsworth was led into larger discussions about what may be going on inside the heads of various human and non-human others. Drawing on his own experiences of composing and ‘muttering’ over his poems in daily walks with his sister, Wordsworth hints at a subvocal language of thought that is patterned and shaped, though not always or exactly worded. Out of a deep personal recognition of a grave disjuncture between thinking and saying, Wordsworth throughout his writing explores the inner lives of others in ways that would prove crucial to Clare, Hardy and other poets writing in the following centuries.

In “Toward a Transatlantic Philosophy of Nature,” Samantha C. Harvey demonstrates how British Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge articulated a philosophy of nature in poetic form that would be reinterpreted in two central prose works of American Transcendentalism: Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Through detailed analysis of the works of Wordsworth and Emerson, Harvey suggests that nature’s vital role in the nineteenth century becomes particularly pronounced when Romanticism is considered as a transnational movement that flowed beyond national boundaries. Harvey shows how a transcendentalist philosophy of nature crossed, recrossed, and crisscrossed the Atlantic in various directions, undergoing continual transformations along the way.

At the start of the Victorian period, the General Post Office began to reinvent itself: from a revenue-raising state department to a public service, an institution vital to the nation’s material, intellectual, and moral development. This chapter argues that the 1830s campaign for postal reform, and the changes to the postal service it prompted in the following decades, ought to be understood in reciprocal relation to the operations and ideologies of other literary institutions – and to the institution of literature more broadly conceived.

The essay pursues two lines of enquiry: first, it seeks to demonstrate how changing Post Office regulations and policies – especially the reduction of postage in 1840 and introduction of the book post in 1858 – shaped literary production, consumption, and circulation, contributing to an apparent democratisation of the literary public sphere. Second, it examines the significance of literary idea(l)s to the Post Office’s institutional culture. Drawing on a range of materials, including postal reform propaganda, Post Office records, and (largely non-canonical) poetry about the penny post, the chapter argues that early Victorian writers worked to create the impression that the Post Office, by facilitating affective, economic, and cultural connection, performed a cultural work analogous to that of literature.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

While Roman Catholicism has not traditionally figured prominently in Romantic studies, this essay traces the emerging sense of its cultural, historical, and political importance in the period. With William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” as a case study, it outlines the political struggle over Catholic Emancipation, transnational contact with Ireland and France, anti-Catholic and philo-Catholic strands of British Romanticism, and contested religious historiographies.

In a 2009 manifesto for map studies, Martin Dodge et al. argue that there is a need for the work of scholars to be informed by the practices and processes of creative cartographers. Noting the proliferation of maps and mappings in contemporary art practice, the geographers contend that ‘creative possibilities … ought to inform our studies too, and that we ought not to separate the analytical from the creative’. This chapter picks up on this braiding of the artistic and the analytical by examining how creative cartographies can open up critical thinking about mapping, place, and Romantic writing. More specifically, this chapter expands the literary historical focus of the collection by interrogating how three post-war landscape writers – Alfred Wainwright, Sean Borodale, and Richard Skelton – have each embedded maps and mapping practices within their creative responses to a cardinal Romantic site: the English Lake District. This chapter, then, thinks critically about the work of three writer-cartographers; but, in turn, it argues that reading this creative work can facilitate critical thinking about place-specific Romantic writing.

Critics have long been puzzled by aspects of William Wordsworth’s “The Discharged Soldier” (1798), such as the abrupt opening, the soldier’s disinterest in telling his story in a genre that requires it, and the speaker’s lack of effusive sympathy. Wordsworth’s theory of desert provides a new way to understand the poem, and a key to understanding the poem’s interplay between capacity and aesthetics. The chapter focuses on the military body and, in particular, the stories about the acquisition of impairments that fictional disabled soldiers are required to tell. Disabled soldiers’ stories often make persuasive cases for desert (in that soldiers are deemed worthy of charity or reward).

Chapter 5 examines the importance of the playbill in general in Romantic-period culture. Playbills represent by far the largest body of ephemeral texts that have survived and this chapter explores the history of their interest to collectors and how the theatre, as part of the category of ‘public amusements’, was integrated into ephemera collecting as a whole. The history of the playbill also focuses a discussion of changes in printing technology around 1800 – mainly the introduction of larger typefaces that could be read from a distance – which led to the emergence of the poster and the increasing colonisation of urban space by print. I argue for the importance of ephemera and ephemerality to Romantic-period media history and also to the genealogy of theatre history as a discipline. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the earliest printed document in Australian history to be discovered to date, a playbill for a performance of the tragedy Jane Shore at the ‘Theatre, Sydney’ in 1796.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.

In 1889, the end of the decade in which all the major literary societies dedicated to poets were formed, Andrew Lang bemoaned their impact: ‘They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude and for their proper pleasure, men and women need confederates in this adventure.’ This shift in reading practices took place during an important decade for poetry. It was the decade during which some of the era’s most renowned poets died, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was the decade in which the relevance of poetry was increasingly questioned, as vernacular English literature was being claimed as having the capacity to be studied ‘scientifically’ like its sibling rival philology. It was also the decade that witnessed extended debate over the establishment of university Chairs of English Literature. In this context, this chapter examines the establishment and overwhelming popularity of literary societies in the 1880s, tracing their movement away from the ethos of a scholarly gentleman’s club towards more democratic, inclusive and experimental literary associations that tangibly impacted the reading of poetry in the 1880s.

This chapter traces the growth of Chaucer’s reputation from the early eighteenth century through the Romantic period. It begins with Dryden’s free modernisations that helped to popularise Chaucer’s works, examines the effects of John Urry’s 1721 edition, and looks closely at the groundbreaking linguistic and editorial work of Thomas Tyrrwhitt, who was the first to edit Chaucer’s verse from the manuscripts, and explained for the first time both the grammar and pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English, as well as an explanation of his metre. Tyrrwhitt’s edition generated new interest in Chaucer among the Romantic poets, especially evident in William Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” the modernisations of Chaucer written by William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Elizabeth Barrett, and the dubious effort by the literary hacks R. H. Horne and Thomas Powell to publish a new set of Chaucer modernisations in 1841.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.