English Romantic Writers and the West Country

Long confounded with a monolithic British entity or misrepresented as 'Lakers' and 'Cockneys', the diverse regional forms of 'English Romanticism' are ripe for reassessment. Ranging west of a line between the Wye at Tintern and Jane Austen's Chawton, this book offers a first reconfiguration of Romantic culture in terms of English regional identity.

'This diverse and absorbing book explores some of the ways in which many of the Romantic writers, both major and minor, found a local inspiration in the West Country. Nicholas Roe's well-judged collection relates for the first time a brilliant chapter in English literary history, and vividly evokes some of its most memorable personalities.' - Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford, UK

'This is a diverse, fascinating and entertaining collection...Anyone seriously interested in early literary Romanticism, the West Country's appeal to the literary imagination or in the distinctive regional varieties of literary Romanticism will want to read it.' -Coleridge Bulletin

Autorentext
PAUL CHESHIRE is author of a number of articles on Coleridge and his contemporaries. He is editor of two websites: www.friendsofcoleridge.com and www.williamgilbert.com, and is a trustee of the Friends of Coleridge. He lives and works in Bath, UK RICHARD CRONIN is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK GRAHAM DAVIDSON is the editor of The Coleridge Bulletin and secretary to The Coleridge Summer Conference TIM FULFORD is a Professor at Nottingham Trent University, UK NICK GROOM is Chair in English at the Universtiy of Exeter's Cornwall Campus, UK ANTHONY JOHN HARDING is Professor Emeritus, University of Saskatchewan, Canada RICHARD HOLMES is the most distinguished Romantic biographer of our times and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy, UK PETER J. KITSON is Professor of English at the University of Dundee, UK TOM MAYBERRY is the County Heritage Officer for Somerset and Chairman of the Friends of Coleridge charitable trust MICHAEL O'NEILL is Professor of English at Durham University, UK JOANNE PARKER is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus, UK LYNDA PRATT is Reader in Romanticism at the University of Nottingham, UK DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES is Reader in Romantic and Victorian Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, UK CAROL KYROS WALKER is Professor Emerita, Department of English, City Colleges of Chicago,US TIMOTHY WHELAN is a Professor of English at Georgia Southern University, US SAEKO YOSHIKAWA is Associate Professor at Kobe City University, Japan

Inhalt
Foreword List of Illustrations Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Preface; R.Holmes Introduction; N.Roe PART I: LANDSCAPES AND LEGENDS 'More wondrous far than Egypt's boasted pyramids': The South West's Megaliths in the Romantic Period; J.Parker 'Al under the wyllowe tree': Chatterton and the Ecology of the West Country; N.Groom PART II: THE BRISTOL SCHOOL: COTTLE, COLERIDGE, AND THEIR CIRCLES Joseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticism; R.Cronin William Gilbert and his Bristol Circle 1788-98; P.Cheshire S.T. Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, and Some Bristol Baptists, 1794-96; T.Whelan Coleridge's Bristol and West Country Radicalism; P.J.Kitson Radical Bible: Coleridge's 1790s West Country Politics; A.J.Harding PART III: IMAGINING THE WEST COUNTRY Wordsworth's 1793 Journey to the West Country and Wales; C.K.Walker Coleridge in Devon; G.Davidson Southey's West Country; L.Pratt Romantic Hydrography: Tide and Transit in 'Tintern Abbey'; D.W.Davies The Road Not Taken: Robert Bloomfield's Wye Valley and the Poetic Imagination; T.Fulford PART IV: IN PURSUIT OF SPRING 'The Outset of Life': Shelley, Hazlitt, the West Country, and the Revolutionary Imagination; M.O'Neill 'Over the Dartmoor Black': John Keats and the West Country; N.Roe Going Westward: William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas; S.Yoshikawa Afterword; T.Mayberry Index