Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture'

by Philip Connell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198185055
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/10/2001
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction, 'The Condition of England'1. 'A Deeper Nature': Malthus, Poetry and Political economy2. Moral Culture and the March of Mind: Economics and Education in the Early Nineteenth Century3. The Politics of Apostasy: Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lake School Literary Conservatism4. Radicals, Reformers and Legislators of the World5. Robert Southey and the Infections of CommerceConclusion, The Politics of RomanticismSelect BibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"The depth of discussion of Wordsworth is characteristic of Connell's excellent book, which does not only examine the older generation of English Romantic poets; one of the most interesting chapters analyses the ambiguous relationship between the 'Hunt school' of younger radical writers...and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his followers. Connell convincingly demonstrates that the traditional view of idealistic literary Radicals at war with bourgeois philistines is a gross and misleading over-simplification. His book cannot be ignored by anyone addressing the tangled but stimulating question of the relationship between English literature and politics in the Romantic period."—The Times Literary Supplement

"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

"[A] successful attempt to correct the often oversimplified and sometimes invented divide between Romantic literary works and utilitarian modes of thought.... The quality of Connell's sustained critical attention to the shared ethical endeavor of 'Romantic' writers and early nineteenth-century economic thought makes this a most significant and welcome study."—Nineteenth-Centrury Literature

From the Publisher