Search results for ""Author Regina Hewitt""

Taking literally Joanna Baillie's claim that drama can promote social justice, the study explores how plays by Baillie, novels by Walter Scott, and Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor address problems of capital punishment, poverty, and political participation. Baillie's and Scott's preoccupation with affective responses to criminals and beggars takes on new significance when situated next to nationalist efforts to use legal differences to promulgate an image of Scotland as a more compassionate society than England and when contrasted with Landor's confidence in political claims-making to meet social needs. The study enlists analogies between the 'symbolic interaction' prompted by the selected writers and the concepts of 'symbolic interaction' still evolving from the sociology of Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, and subsequent practitioners to recover a belief in the social efficacy of literature that was accepted during the pre-disciplinary Romantic era but contested throughout much of the twentieth century. The study advocates the renewal of literary interventionism in our post-disciplinary age.

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Two hundred years after the massacre of protestors in Manchester, known as Peterloo, distinguished scholars of Romantic-era literature join together in this commemorative volume to assess the implications of the violence.

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A former revolutionary Scotsman achieves prosperity in New York through hard work and social networking Scholarly edition that distinguishes the 1832 text from the 1830 texts and presents it with a glossary of Scottish terms and historical notes Introduction that examines Galt's techniques for combining fiction with lived experience and that provides contextual information about emigration from Scotland, political reform in Britain, and socio-economic conditions and aspirations in New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century Maps that enable readers to put together the novel's imaginary and actual locations In Lawrie Todd (1830; rev. ed. 1832), John Galt paints an optimistic portrait of Scottish emigration to North America. Designed as a fictional autobiography, the novel charts the fortunes of its protagonist from his departure from Scotland to avoid being tried for treason over his French Revolutionary sympathies to his rise to prosperity as a shopkeeper in New York City and imaginary towns near Rochester. This edition of the novel provides a contextual introduction, explanatory notes and maps that connect Todd's life story with boom times in New York and with Galt's own efforts at social entrepreneurship in Canada as well as with debates over emigration and political reforms in Britain. It sheds light on Galt's methods of characterisation, including his use of Scots and Yankee" speech habits and adaptation of real-life models, and on his popularity with readers in his own time. "

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