Close Reading the Nineteenth Century

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-33075-8
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan

Buch, Englisch, 334 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm

This collection of essays provides upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers with a fresh view of the nineteenth century through 18 readings of individual texts from 1800-1900, chosen to show the range and diversity of the Romantic-Victorian period, combining the still-canonical with the newly recovered. After decades of critical focus on historical context, this collection seeks to re-centre close analysis on the literary text – broadly conceived – attending to form and texture, while also drawing in dialogues with other texts, responses and contexts. The aim is not to displace historical awareness, but to show how it might be combined with attention to literary shape, which is itself subject to historical, political and aesthetic forces. The 18 readings explore poetry, fiction, essays, drama and periodicals, ensuring full coverage of the formal and thematic diversity of print culture across the century. Our claim is that close reading emerges in the nineteenth century as a central concern of literary, critical and cultural practice. The collection seeks to disrupt the conventional critical division of Romantic from Victorian, showing how formal experimentation works throughout the nineteenth century as literary shape is recreated in each decade of cultural and technological development, alongside a continuous dialogue with literary commonalities and inheritances.

Zielgruppe

Upper undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kovesi, Simon

Stabler, Jane

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Pädagogik Pädagogik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction by Simon Kovesi and Jane Stabler.- Chapter 2: Lamb’s Cuts: From ‘Pride’s Cure’ to ‘John Woodvil’ by Gregory Dart.- Chapter 3: Walking by Her Native Lake: Wordsworth, ‘Stepping Westward’ by Fiona Stafford.- Chapter 4: The ‘Epistle to Augusta’: A Turning Point in Byron’s Poetry by Drummond Bone and Jane Stabler.- Chapter 5: Keats’s Lamia: The Poet as Novelist by Kelvin Everest.- Chapter 6: Peacock’s ‘Four Ages of Poetry’ and the Politics of Olliers Literary Miscellany by John Gardner.- Chapter 7: The Sociability of Pierce Egan’s Life in London: ‘This Brilliant Assemblage’ by Simon Kovesi.- Chapter 8: Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Lucretian Cosmogony: ‘The New-Born Star’ by Jeremy Davies.- Chapter 9: Rereading Walter Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel by David Stewart.- Chapter 10: Reading Browning’s ‘Porphyria’ for the First Time by Britta Martens.- Chapter 11: Unreturning Seasons, or the Lyric Present After Habitat Loss: A Reading of John Clare’s ‘Sonnet: Wood Anemone’ by Cassandra Falke.- Chapter 12: Reading the Endings of Charlotte Brontë’s Novels by Sarah Wootton.- Chapter 13: How Browning Read Shelley by Seamus Perry.- Chapter 14: ‘Helter Skelter, Hurry Skurry’: Form, Format, and Formation in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ by Alison Chapman.- Chapter 15: ‘My Secret’: Christina Rossetti and the Dramatic Monologue by Antony Harrison.- Chapter 16: Making Music in Colonial Tahiti: Hearing Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide by Emma Sutton.- Chapter 17: ‘The Other Side of a Mirror’ by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Reading Reflection by Anna Barton.- Chapter 18: Tracing the ‘Dry Bones’ of Empire: Fergus Hume’s Hagar of the Pawnshop by Maitrayee Roychoudhury.- Chapter 19: And Now, Nothing Endures: Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ by Thomas Docherty.

Über Autor(innen)

Simon Kovesi is Professor of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. He focuses on Romantic-period culture, and working-class writing from 1800 through to the present day. His books include  (2003), (2007), (2015), (2017), and (2020). He is currently co-editing Pierce Egan’s (1821) for Oxford World’s Classics.

Jane Stabler is Professor of Romantic Literature in the School of English, University of St Andrews, UK. She works on Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and English travel writing. Her books include (2002), (2007), (2013) and an edition of Jane Austen’s Park for Oxford World’s Classics (2003). She is the lead editor for the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Lord Byron’s Poetry. The first two volumes of  were published in 2024.