Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection of essays examines the construction and contestation of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the world of polite arts and letters that would later come to be identified with British Romanticism.
Trade ReviewReview 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
Table of ContentsPart 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.
