Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' [Hardcover]

Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book situates canonical Romantic writers within a nuanced, and highly detailed ideological context, while challenging our inherited understanding of the Romantic tradition itself as the social conscience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

Introduction,'The Condition of England'
1. 'A Deeper Nature': Malthus, Poetry and Political economy
2. Moral Culture and the March of Mind: Economics and Education in the Early Nineteenth Century
3. The Politics of Apostasy: Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lake School Literary Conservatism
4. Radicals, Reformers and Legislators of the World
5. Robert Southey and the Infections of Commerce
Conclusion,The Politics of Romanticism
Select Bibliography
Index

Connell seems to have unearthed every possible work and author relating to political economy, popular education, and religious politics; the result is a rich, dense, and convincing study that deconstructs pieties of the scholarly left and right. . . . His book is persuasive because it is thick with evidence and always interested in exploring the larger implications of the subtle shades of opinion he finds in the printed discussions of the era. . . . [An] immensely learned and scholarly work --College Literature

Philip Connell is Research Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge