Romantic Victorians

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley, and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors or works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs. This is a literary period in which literature fully entered the marketplace, and in which an ideology was constitued - civic, domestic, Christian and imperial - that was to inform British society for more than a century. These are among the issues that Cronin addresses and, in so doing, successfully restructures nineteenth-century literary studies.

This is a book about the most neglected period of English literature, the period that intervened between the death of the younger Romantics and the emergence of the major Victorians, a period so neglected that it was not even given a name.

Richard Cronin is Professor of English Literature, University of Glasgow. Previous works are: Shelley's Poetic Thoughts; Color and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry; Imagining India; 1798: The Year of the 'Lyrical Ballads;' The Politics of Romantic Poetry.