By Jonathan Sachs (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) Anxieties about decline were a prominent feature of British public discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These anxieties were borne out repeatedly in books and periodicals, pamphlets and poems. Tracing the reciprocal development of Romantic-era Britain's rapidly expanding literary and market cultures through the lens of … Continued
By John A. Hodgson (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The English Romantic writers and poets valued a genuine coherence of image and idea. Striving for organic form, they were faced with the challenge of using figuration – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – to represent the essentially unrepresentable: God, ultimate power, the human mind and psyche, what Shelley called … Continued
By Jean H. Hagstrum (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1986–87)
By Eric G. Wilson (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) This lively intellectual biography of the second half of Coleridge's life argues that the poet, in his mature work, reveals a brilliant though troubled genius for conveying the ambiguities of psychological limbo. Asserting that the later poetry is the key element of Coleridge's career, Eric G. Wilson proposes … Continued
Edited by Frances Ferguson (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2003–04) and Helen Regueiro Elam Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary … Continued
By Jean H. Hagstrum (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1986–87) A discussion about the period of English literature and culture from the Restoration to Romanticism (1660 to 1827, the year of Blake’s death). The quest by literary leaders for integrity within themselves and their culture is the underlying preoccupation of the period and also of the essays … Continued
By Steven Goldsmith (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) A fascinating study of the relation be- tween the textual and the historical in apocalyptic representation in texts as di- verse as Revelation, an array of eighteenth-century biblical commentary, Percy Shelley's "Popular Songs," Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man.
By Robert Mitchell (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) Experimental Life establishes the multiple ways in which Romantic authors appropriated the notion of experimentation from the natural sciences. Winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, BSLS Book Prize of the British Society for Literature and Science If the objective … Continued
By Mary A. Favret (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the … Continued
Edited by J. Paul Hunter (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1995–96) Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley’s finest work. This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts and illustrative materials that convey the enduring global conversation about Frankenstein and its author. The text is that of the 1818 first … Continued