England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism [Paperback]

Many of the writers from 1819, argues James Chandler, were acutely aware not only of their writing's place in history, but also of its placeashistory—a realization of a literary spirit of the age that resonates strongly with the current return to history in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism and offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

1819? At first sight, it might not seem a 'hot date'; but as James Chandler argues in his powerful book, it would be a mistake to overlook a year of such exceptional political conflagration and literary pyrotechnics in British history. Chandler's study is a wide-ranging, enormously ambitious, densely packed, closely argued work. —John Brewer,New Republic

The book's largest argument, and the source of its considerable revelations, is that late twentieth-century practices of cultural history-writing have their roots in the peculiar Romantic historicism born in post-Waterloo Britain. —Jon Klancher,Times Literary Supplement

A monumental work of scholarship. —Terry Eagleton,The Independent

List of Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: Works and Days
Pt. 1: The Historical Situation of Romanticism
Ch. 1: Specificity after Structuralism: Dating the Return to History
Ch. 2: An Art of the State: Historicism and the Measures of Uneven Development
Ch. 3: Representing Culture, Romanticizing Contradiction: The Politics of Literary Exemplarity
Ch. 4: Altering the Case: The Invention of the Historical Situation
Pt. 2: Reading England in 1819
Ch. 5: Reopening the Case of Scott
Ch. 6: Byron's Causes: The Moral Mechanics of Don Juan
Ch. 7: An 1819 Temper : Keats and the History of Psyche
Ch. 8: Concerning the Influence of America on the Mind: Western Settlements, English Writers, and the Case of U.l#á