1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads

MARILYN GAULL Professor of English, Temple University and New York University JAMES A. W. HEFFERNAN Professor of English, Dartmouth College ALICE JENKINS Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow PETER JIMACK Emeritus Professor of French, University of Stirling and Senior Research Fellow, University of Glasgow DOROTHY MCMILLAN Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow STEPHEN PRICKETT Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow NICHOLAS ROE Professor of English, University of St. Andrews CLIFFORD SISKIN Professor of English and Comparative Literature, State University of New York JANE STABLER Lecturer in English, University of Dundee.

• Contributors Introduction The Year of the System; C. Siskin Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Turn of the Century; N. Trott `Dr' Bailliel; D. McMillan Malthus on the Road to Excess; M. Gaull Gebir and Jacobin Poetry; R. Cronin Humphrey Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light; A. Jenkins England and France in 1798: The Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Romantics; P. Jimack Coleridge, Schlegel and Schleiermacher: England, Germany (and Australia) in 1798; S. Prickett `Atmospheric Air Itself': Medical Science, Politics and Poetry in Thelwall, Coleridge and Wordsworth; N. Roe Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798; J. Stabler Wordsworth's `Leveling' Muse in 1798; J.A.W. Heffernan Index

Richard Cronin's 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballards...cheerfully decenters the publication...whose bicentennial is its putative occasion...In a wide-ranging essay, Gaull brings a lively reading to Malthus's Essay that illuminates how its primary subject focuses a range of interests across the social and cultural landscape of 1798...Stabler wonders how to assay the parade of sufferers in Lyrical Ballards in the scale of sentiment and satire. It's a good question [a fresh and decidedly helpful approach] to a volume whose trickiest poems, such as Simon Lee, frame this dilemma: does this poet make ridiculous the figure for whom he is always exhorting our sympathy?' - Susan J. Wolfson, The Wordsworth Circle 'This is, altogether, a suggestive and diverse collection - and a strong inauguration for a hand-some new series, Romanticism in Perspective.' - Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement