The Regency revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the making of the modern world
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 3261
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Atlantic Books
- ISBN
- 9781786491237
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 350-page monograph is a panoramic account of the Regency (1811-1820). It took almost ten years to write, and was funded by a $44,879 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant, most of which was spent on archival research in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland. The Regency Revolution exploits a series of narrative techniques and historicist methodologies to explore issues ranging from drug use, colonial violence, prostitution, politics, and scientific experimentation to fashion, food, poetry, sport, landscape painting, and religiously-inspired philanthropy. It is the most comprehensive account of the Regency ever published.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Regency prized sociability and an outward gaze, as opposed to the solitariness and inwardness we customarily associate with the Romantic era. Yet the Regency is at the core of Romanticism. We need to think differently about early nineteenth-century Britain, and I seek in the Regency Revolution to encourage this re-thinking by combining accounts of high society and poverty, high culture with popular culture, in a way that reflects the diversity of the Regency itself.
The book has at its crux an innovative methodology that combines intellectual sophistication with popular appeal. It took almost ten years to write, involved research trips to archives in both Britain and North America, and contains almost 10,000 words of scholarly endnotes. But The Regency Revolution is not a dry, dutiful survey. Rather, it is a panoramic account of the period that ranges much further than any previous examination of the Regency decade, and that is organized into five thematic chapters, each of which brings a series of paradoxes, collisions, and parallels vividly into view. The book concentrates on major events (Waterloo, Peterloo, and the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval) and major figures (Brummell, Wellington, the Shelleys, Constable, and Turner). But it also encompasses actors, courtesans, indigenous leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes, engineers, rakes, and explorers.
My methodology is modelled in part on some of the most famous writings of the Regency itself, including Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Byron’s Don Juan, Scott’s Waverley, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, each of which raises serious contemporary issues in a popular manner. Among many advantages, this methodology advances one of the central aims of the book, which is to argue for a radical reconceptualisation of both British Romanticism and the Regency itself. The book was simultaneously published in the USA and the UK.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
