Overview

The 1810s – a decade marked by the challenges of war, monarchy, poverty, religion, and nationalism – are immortalised in Percy Bysshe Shelley's impassioned but despairing sonnet, 'England in 1819', as a graveyard of undead ideologies from which he longs that a 'Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day'. Criticism too often looks past the 1810s and towards the illusory border between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' to hunt down these bright phantoms and follow their progress into a century of cultural, affective, philosophical, and political transformation. Yet the 1810s were more than a threshold decade from which we were thrown into the beginnings of the modern world. As the essays in this volume reveal, the 1810s brought into focus new questions about subjects as broad as the imagination, literary form, morality, aesthetics, race, politics, the environment, the body, gender, and sexuality.

Full Product Details

Author:   Emma Mason (University of Warwick)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009292894

ISBN 10:   1009292897
Pages:   346
Publication Date:   26 March 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; 'Introduction: walking spirits and bursting phantoms' Emma Mason; 1. 'The political ecology of matter: marbles, volcanoes and humans' Dewey W. Hall; 2. 'Political action at a distance: simultaneity, mediation and nationhood 1817–1819' Mary Fairclough; 3. 'Wordsworth's churchyards: composting localism in compromised sacred commons' Joshua King; 4. 'The aesthetic life of racism: figuring humanity in the 1810s' Bakary Diaby; 5. 'For the love of mankind: philanthropy, benevolence and the conservative novels of Harriet Waller Weeks and Lady Dunn' Patricia Comitini; 6. 'The collector and the collected: Jane Austen and the 1810s novel' Rita J. Dashwood; 7. 'Rambling, regency queer-coded communities among Anne Lister and her roving Ilk' Kate Singer; 8. 'The regency of pornography: The 1810s, an Erotic Antiquarian Hoax, and the resistance to liberal progress' Ruth M. McAdams; 9. 'Weakness in the right: Lucy Aikin, idiocy, and Wollstonecraft's feminist legacy in 1810' Fuson Wang; 10. 'Romantic decadence: mortality and materialist poetics in the 1810s' Ashley Miller; 11. 'Collaboration, the first Frankenstein (1818), and the Shelleys' creative processes behind History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)' Anna Mercer; 12. 'Rhyme, anticipation, and a slip of the ear: Ottava Rima in the 1810s' Stacey McDowell; Index.

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Author Information

Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. An internationally acclaimed scholar of theology and literature, she has received fellowships from Corpus Christi, Oxford, University of Madison-Wisconsin, the Huntington Library, the Leverhulme, and British Academy. She regularly speaks on her research at universities worldwide.

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