Romanticism and Theatrical Experience
Kean, Hazlitt and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News

Provides new theatrical contexts for Romantic-period literary writing, reframing the relationship between theater and poetry in Regency London.

Jonathan Mulrooney (Author)

9781107183872, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 January 2019

292 pages, 6 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.61 kg

'This truly important book - generous in its acknowledgment of other scholars and energizing in its vivid, sharp, entertaining style - expands our sense of Romantic era theater and print culture, advances our sense of Cockneyism in the period, and offers fresh, powerful accounts of Haz-litt and Keats.' Jeffrey N. Cox, The Wordsworth Circle

Bringing together studies in theater history, print culture, and literature, this book offers a new consideration of Romantic-period writing in Britain. Recovering a wide range of theatrical criticism from newspapers and periodicals, some of it overlooked since its original publication in Regency London, Jonathan Mulrooney explores new contexts for the work of the actor Edmund Kean, essayist William Hazlitt, and poet John Keats.  Kean's ongoing presence as a figure in the theatrical news presented readers with a provocative re-imagining of personal subjectivity and a reworking of the British theatrical tradition. Hazlitt and Keats, in turn, imagined the essayist and the poet along similar theatrical lines, reframing Romantic prose and poetics. Taken together, these case studies illustrate not only theater's significance to early nineteenth-century Londoners, but also the importance of theater's textual legacies for our own re-assessment of 'Romanticism' as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. The Making of British Theater Audiences: 1. Theater and the daily news
2. Britain's theatrical press 1800–1830
Part II. Theater and Late Romanticism: 3. Edmund Kean's controversy
4. Hazlitt's romantic occasionalism
5. Keats, Kean, and the poetics of interruption
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Theatre studies [AN]