Book Details

An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832

art, music, design, science, and the history of ideas, within a comprehensive picture of the period. Forty long essays on key topics, written by major international authorities, are complemented by an alphabetical reference section detailing all the significant figures, works, topics, and major

events. Illustrated throughout. - ;For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion's two-part structure presents forty-two essays on major topics, by leading international experts, cross-referenced to an extensive alphabetical section covering all the principal figures, events, and movements in the broad culture of the period. Aimed at students and general readers as well as

scholars, the essays constitute an accessible, pluralistic, and modern social history of the epoch; the alphabetical entries can either be used alongside them, for deeper information on specific subjects, or as a free-standing reference tool. The volume as a whole embraces both high and low culture, and

explores its subject across the whole breadth of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

The book's multi-disciplinary approach treats Romanticism both in aesthetic terms-its meaning for painting, music, design, architecture, and above all literature-and as a historical epoch of 'revolutionary' transformations which ushered in modern democratic and industrialized society. In this period Wedgwood turned taste into a commercial enterprise, Pierce Egan took Britain by storm with his sensational accounts of low-life in the capital, and Mary Shelley created, in Frankenstein, one of the

enduring myths of scientific advance. The Companion revitalizes canonical Romantic figures in the context of the historical events, political and linguistic debates, commercial pressures, and plebeian subcultures of their day, as well as bringing back into historical focus individuals and events

whose impact has often been muffled or forgotten.

With over 100 integrated illustrations, bibliographies accompanying all the major essays, and an index to Part 1, this is the most comprehensive volume of its kind, offering a unique breadth of information to scholars and students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, literature, and history.

EDITORIAL BOARD:

John Brewer (University of California)

Marilyn Butler (Exeter College, University of Oxford)

James Chandler (University of Chicago)

Jerome J. McGann ( University of Virginia, Charlottesville)

Mark Philp (Oriel College, Oxford)

Robert Webb (University of Maryland) - ;This is not only an invaluable source of information on a dazzling range of topics, but also a volume bristling with ideas - and ideals. There is an explicitly radical, polemical edge to many of the contributions, and if these essays and entries provoke the active engagement of the reader rather than merely delivering knowledge with an air of unchallengeable authority, they are more than upholding the spirit of the age that is under debate. - Fiona Stafford, Review of English Studies

• The Last Alchemist
• Enlightenment World

• The Art of War
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
• Too Big to Fail