Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition

This 1998 book examines the legacy of Romantic poetics in nineteenth-century political poetry.

Anne Janowitz (Author)

9780521572590, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 August 1998

294 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

'This is an important, groundbreaking study in its reconceptualisation of Romantic poetics and in the long overdue critical and historical attention it pays to a fertile corpus of poetry published in radical newspapers and periodicals from the 1830s to the 1890s … this is a paradigm-breaking study that rewrites traditional accounts of Romantic poetics and also re-maps the literary-poetic landscape of the nineteenth century.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, first published in 1998, examines the legacy of Romantic poetics in the poetry produced in political movements during the nineteenth century. It argues that a communitarian tradition of poetry extending from the 1790s to the 1890s learned from and incorporated elements of Romantic lyricism, and produced an ongoing and self-conscious tradition of radical poetics. Showing how romantic lyricism arose as an engagement between the forces of reason and custom, Anne Janowitz examines the ways in which this Romantic dialectic infected the writings of political poets from Thomas Spence to William Morris. The book includes new readings of familiar Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Shelley, and investigates the range of poetic genres in the 1790s. In the case studies which follow, it examines relatively unknown Chartist and Republican poets such as Ernest Jones and W. J. Linton, showing their affiliation to the Romantic tradition, and making the case for the persistence of Romantic problematics in radical political culture.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Romantic studies as a unified field
Part I. A Dialectic of Romanticism: 1. The communitarian lyric in the dialectic of Romanticism
2. Ballad, lyrical ballad, lyric
3. The sun and the tree: lyrics of liberty
Part II. Interventionist Poetics in the Tradition of Romanticism: 4. Allen Davenport on the threshold of Chartism
5. The forms of Chartist poetry and poetics: 1838–46
6. Labour's laureates: Allen Davenport, Thomas Cooper, and Ernest Jones in 1846
7. W. J. Linton and William Morris: Republican and Socialist poetics
Conclusion
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]