Gothic Romanticism: Wordsworth, Architecture, Politics, Form

by Tom Duggett

Overview

Gothic Romanticism: Wordsworth, Architecture, Politics, Form offers a revisionist account of both Wordsworth and the politics of antiquarianism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a historically-driven study that develops a significant critique and revision of genre- and theory-based approaches to the Gothic, it covers many key works by Wordsworth and his fellow “Lake Poets” Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. The second edition incorporates new materials that develop the argument in new directions opened up by changes in the field over the last decade. The book also provides a sustained reflection upon Romantic conservatism, including the political thought and lasting influence of Edmund Burke. New material places the book in wider and longer context of the political and historical forms seen developing in Wordsworth, and proposes Gothic Romanticism as the alternative line of cultural development to Victorian Medievalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030968342
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	06/03/2022
Series:	Palgrave Gothic
Edition description:	2nd ed. 2022
Pages:	307
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tom Duggett is Senior Associate Professor of Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China, and honorary fellow of the University of Liverpool, UK. He has published widely in journals including Review of English Studies, Romanticism and The Wordsworth Circle, and recently produced a two-volume scholarly edition of Robert Southey’s historical dialogue, Sir Thomas More: Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (2018). He serves as an Advisory Editor of the journal Romanticism.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition.- Introduction.- Romantic Poets and Gothic Culture.- Radical Gothic: Politics and Antiquarianism in Salisbury Plain (1794).- “By Gothic Virtue Won”: Romantic Poets Fighting the Peninsular War.- Wordsworth’s Gothic Education.- Interchapter. The Staring Nation.- Futures Past: Temporalization and Tradition in “Michael” (1800).- The Style Historic: The Gothic Line from Wordsworth to Hardy.- Conclusion. Gothic and Theory: The Reflecting Word.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this important new edition of Gothic Romanticism, Tom Duggett explores the wide and challenging field of cultural Gothicism: architecture, politics, and form. His impressively detailed account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic is wonderfully rich and rewarding, showing how it is actively social and political and integral to the advent of Romanticism. Duggett’s focus is on William Wordsworth – usually neglected in Gothic studies but here recast as the chief architect of this emergent culture. In fluent prose and with telling rigour, Duggett develops new ways of understanding Gothicism through an approach that is refreshingly historicist and culturally ambitious, encompassing the literary uses of architecture, national and international politics, and educational theory. What arises from this strikingly original analysis is a significant re-evaluation of Wordsworth and sophisticated new models of both Gothicism and Romanticism.” (Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, Macao)