Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School
Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle

A 1999 study of the work of Romantic poets in the circle known as the 'Cockney School'.

Jeffrey N. Cox (Author)

9780521604239, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 May 2004

300 pages, 11 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.472 kg

'… meticulously researched and beautifully written … Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School integrates the culture of the late-Romantic writers clearly and concretely into the social and political history of the late Romantic period … a wonderful book.' European Romantic Review

Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of 'second generation' Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the 'Cockney School'. Offering a theory of the group as a key site for cultural production, Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others, as they engaged in literary contests, wrote poems celebrating one another, and worked collaboratively on journals and other projects. Cox also recovers the work of neglected writers such as John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and Cornelius Webb as part of the rich social and cultural context of Hunt's circle. This 1999 book not only demonstrates convincingly that a 'Cockney School' existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform.

Preface
or, the visionary company, INC.
1. The 'Cockney School' attacks: or the anti-romantic ideology
2. The Hunt era
3. John Keats, coterie poet
4. Staging hope: genre, myth and ideology in the dramas of the Hunt circle
5. Cockney classicism: history with footnotes
6. Final reckonings: Keats and Shelley on the wealth of the imagination.

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