ABSTRACT

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Reflections on an Orthodoxy

chapter 2|11 pages

The Hair of Milton

Historicism and Literary History

chapter 3|17 pages

“In Embalmèd Darkness”

Keats, the Picturesque, and the Limits of Historicization

chapter 4|19 pages

Telling Lives to Children

Young Versus New Historicism in Little Arthur's History of England

chapter 5|24 pages

Whose History? My Place or Yours?

Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions

chapter 6|23 pages

Overlooking History

The Case of John Thelwall

chapter 11|18 pages

Leigh Hunt and Romantic Biography