The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion provides the first scholarly survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life during the British Romantic period (1780s–1832). The collection of seventeen scholarly essays introduces the diverse religious influences on the literature of the times. Part one, “Historical Developments,” surveys diverse religious communities, texts, and figures that shaped British Romantic culture, investigating the influence of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and atheism on the literature of the times. Part two, “Literary Forms,” considers British Romanticism and religion through attention to major genres such as poetry, the novel, drama, sermons and lectures, and life writing. Part three, “Disciplinary Connections,” explores links between religion, literature, and other areas of intellectual life during the period, including philosophy, science, politics, music, and painting.

On the Horizon of World Literature

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

Irish Romanticism

Irish Romanticism, taken here to mean writing and writers that contributed to a specific form of Romanticism that can be regarded as ‘Irish’, is not in character a subset of ‘British’ Romanticism as is often assumed, but a form of Romanticism with its own points of origin, preoccupations and symbolism that were often counter to wider Romantic values. This article examines the influence of Ireland on literature of the Romantic period, and the characteristics of a specifically Irish Romanticism in literature, focussing on the context, content and the major Irish writers of the period.