English Romantic Writers and the West Country [Hardcover]

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.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

'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 evoklcª