Remaking Romanticism The Radical Politics of the Excerpt [Paperback]

This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political endsand for their largely working-class readershiplong after those works original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwins Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process. 

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: The 1790s, Extended.- Chapter 2: Reanimating Caleb Williams; or, How to Keep the 1790s Alive.-  Chapter 3: The Past Jumps Up: Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.-  Part II: Politics and Poetics.- Chapter 4: The Lyric Speaker Goes to Gaol: British Poetry and Radical Prisoners.- Chapter 5: From Citation to Recitation: Shelleys Men of England.- Chapter 6: Coda.-  Bibliography.- Index.