Romanticism and Form

BERNARD BEATTY Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool, UKMARIA NELLA CARMINATI Lecturer in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics at the University of Milan Bicocca, ItalyPAUL M. CURTIS Professor of English Language and Literature at the Université de Moncton, CanadaMARTIN FISCHER Reader in Psychology, University of Dundee, UKCAROLINE FRANKILIN Professor of English, University of Wales, Swansea, UKGAVIN HOPPS Academic Fellow, University of St Andrews, UKSTEVEN E. JONES Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago, USAJACQUELINE M. LABBE Professor of English, University of Warwick, UKMICHAEL O'NEILL Professor of English, Durham University, UKANDREW MICHAEL ROBERTS Reader in English, University of Dundee, UKMARK SANDY Lecturer in English Studies, Durham University, UKJANE STABLER Reader in Romanticism in the School of English, University of St Andrews, UKNICOLA TROTT Head of the Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, UKSUSAN J. WOLFSON Professor of English, Princeton University, USA

• Notes on Contributors Introduction; A.Rawes Romantic Indirection; P.Curtis "Conscript Fathers and Shuffling Recruits": Formal Self-Awareness in Romantic Poetry; M.O'Neill Romantic Invocation: a Form of Impossibility; G.Hopps "Ruinous Perfection": Reading Authors and Writing Readers in the Romantic Fragment Poem; M.Sandy Combinatoric Form in Nineteenth-Century Satiric Prints; S.E.Jones Romantic Form and New Historicism: Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"; A.Rawes Southey's Forms of Experiment; N.Trott Believing in Form and Forms of Belief: the Case of Robert Southey; B.Beatty Seductions of Form in the Poetry of Ann Cristall and Charlotte Smith; J.Labbe "Seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely": Byron's Poetry, Austen's Prose and Forms of Narrative Irony; C.Franklin "What Constitutes a Reader?": Don Juan and the Changing Reception of Romantic Form; J.Stabler, A.Roberts, M.N.Carminati & M.H.Fischer Afterword; S.J.Wolfson Bibliography Index

'The critics assembled here are close readers, attentive to metre, stanza form, figures of speech, but they are not nostalgic for the New Criticism of the 1950s and 1960s. If they are formalists, they are formalists of a new kind, less likely to celebrate the unifying power of art than the fragmented and the multitudinous, more likely to acknowledge Byron than Wordsworth, but just as ready to study a satiric print, or a poem by Ann Cristall. This volume sets a challenging new agenda for Romantic Studies.' - Richard Cronin, Professor of English Literature, University of Glasgow, UK