The Romantic Age

• Provides original essays from a variety of multi-disciplinary scholars on the Romantic era
• Includes fresh insights into such topics as religious controversy and politics, empire and nationalism, and the relationship of Romanticism to modernist aesthetics
• Ranges across the Romantic era's literary, visual, and non-fictional genres

A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age explores the diverse issues and debates of the Romantic era, treating it both aesthetically and as a transformational historical epoch that ushered in Britain's modern industrialized society.

In a series of original, multi-disciplinary essays from scholarly experts, the text explores the full range of the Romantic period's literary, visual, and non-fictional genres — from poetry, drama, and the novel, to periodical writing, literary criticism, painting and panoramas. These richly-varied, innovative contributions provide fresh new critical insights into the era's religious controversy and politics, natural history and the "second scientific revolution", empire and nationalism, the relationship between Romanticism to modernist aesthetics, and more. Compelling and scholarly, A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age enhances our understanding of the Romantics' imaginative and emotional responses to the conflicting forces of change that swept through Britain during this brief but crucially important literary and cultural era.

Jon Klancher teaches Romantic and Victorian literature, the sociology of culture, and the history of books and reading at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written widely on Romantic and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural history in such journals and collections as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, MLQ, Romantic Metropolis, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The New Historicism, and The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1837. Author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (1987), he is currently completing a book, Transfiguring “Arts & Sciences”: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age.