XII - Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period

Abstract

First paragraph: Two of the major themes to come out of the works published in 2014 in the field of Romantic general and prose writing are those of local, national, and global identities, and questions of selfhood. Sarah Houghton-Walker’s Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period looks at the representation of the gypsy figure in the Romantic period in relation to English identities, among other themes. David Higgins’s Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–1850 examines local English identities in relation to broader conceptions of the self in an increasingly connected national or global context. Two texts also make use of the growing field of Atlantic studies to take a fresh look at travel writing, in the case of Elizabeth A. Bohls’s Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean 1770–1833, and the theme of hospitality in Romantic-period texts in the case of Cynthia Schoolar Williams’s Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815–1835, which was published as part of Palgrave’s The New Urban Atlantic series. I will begin by discussing these texts before moving on to other key publications, which include interesting new insights in the field of women’s reading and writing, the study of emotions and feeling, and historical and political writing