Abstract
This book examines the poetic life of republican political ideas in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Analyzing the work of poets who espoused republican ideals, from William Blake to W. J. Linton to Algernon Charles Swinburne, this study shows how republican poems reflected and refracted the theories of political change that animated the expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Beginning with songs of demystification written in the wake of the French Revolution, I trace the history of nineteenth-century republican poetry through poets’ contributions to the rebuilding of republican politics during the 1820s, the proliferation and diversification of republican poetry during the 1840s and 1850s, and its dispersal into aestheticism, advanced liberalism, and secularism during the 1870s. Through this historical approach, I tell the story of the intertwined fate of republican politics and republican poetry, connecting the philosophical debates, organizational practices, cultural institutions, and political events of republican politics to the formal strategies of republican verse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2003)
David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism,’ The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443–75
Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–505; Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Frank Prochaska, The Republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London: Penguin, 2000)
Mark Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790s,’ The Journal of Political Philosophy 6.3 (1998): 235–62
Mark Francis and John Morrow, A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s, 1994), p. 4.
Gregory Claeys, ‘The Origins and the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805,’ Journal of Modern History 66 (June 1994): 249–90
Gregory Claeys, ‘Introduction’ to Political Writings of the 1790s (London: Pickering, 1995), pp. xvii–lvi
James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 6.
Mark Bevir, ‘English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century,’ History of Political Thought 17.1 (Spring 1996): 114–27
Wootton, ‘Introduction,’ Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, p. 33; Prochaska, Republic of Britain, p. xv; David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–15.
Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 7.
That centrality has been the subject of significant historiographical debate since its most compelling statement in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
John Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism, and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England,’ Social History 6.1 (Jan. 1981): 1–32
Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money, and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)
James Vernon, ‘Notes Toward an Introduction,’ Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21
William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ [1825], Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 348.
Wordsworth, The Prelude [1805], William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), X: 692–93.
William Irvine and Park Honan, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 13
Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 114–27.
Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography [1873], ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 121.
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
Thomas Carlyle, OnHeroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1841], ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1901), pp. 89
Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)
Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 8.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962).
John Sterling, review of Tennyson, Poems [Quarterly Review lxx (Sept. 1842): 385–416]
William Johnson Fox, review of Ternnyon, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical [Westminster Review xiv (Jan. 1831): 210–24]
Charles Kingsley, review of Matthew Arnold, Poems [Fraser’s Magazine xlix (Feb. 1854): 140–49]
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 43.
Richard Simpson, review of Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book [North British Review 11 (Oct. 1869): 97–126]
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism [1891] in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 257.
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Ferris, Silent Urns; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984)
Richard Marggraf Turley, The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 66–92
Laura L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 64.
Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 13.
James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 12.
Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 3
Ellen Rooney, ‘Form and Contentment,’ MLQ 61.1 (Mar. 2000): 17–40
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction,’ The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 15.
J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 5.
Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
Walter Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli,’ Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 105.
Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998)
Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
Copyright information
© 2005 Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Weiner, S.K. (2005). Introduction. In: Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599680_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599680_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54395-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59968-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)