British Romanticism and Continental Influences Writing in an Age of Europhobia [Hardcover]

During the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex and ambivalent responses to this threatening literary invasion. Confronted with foreign texts that seemed both attractive and repulsive, Mortensen argues, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge publicly distanced themselves from European sensationalism, even as they assimilated and revised its conventions in their own writing.Acknowledgements Introduction: 'Sickly and Stupid German Tragedies' 'We Know that the Enemy Is Working among Us': The Rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia 'Dethroning German Sublimity': Outrageous Stimulation in Romantic Ballad-Writing 'Il Est Devenue Classique en Angleterre': Some Versions of Romantic (Anti-)Pastoral 'Partizans of the German Theatre': The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Dramatic Translation 'The Descent of Odin': Romantic Writers among the Norsemen Notes Index

'This book will make an important contribution to the new wave of Romantic studies currently broadening the worldly contexts of Romanticism away from a narrowly conceived English nativism.' - Saree Makdisi, Professor of English, University of California

PETER MORTENSEN was educated in Denmark and the US, and is currently Lecturer of English at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches modern British and American Literature.