Romanticism and the Letter
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27Z_OP_B0008
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9783030293093
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- 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
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This volume (270pp.), co-edited by Howe and Madeleine Callaghan, is the result of a two-year project that set out to provide the first systematic examination of letter writing as an important component of Romantic-period English Literature. So doing, the book further aims to develop new, historically-informed theoretical approaches to letter writing as a textual and social practice. An extended scholarly introduction (pp.1-14) was jointly authored by the two editors, while Howe’s own original essay, ‘Keats, the Letter and the Poem’, (pp. 235-252) considers the question of how we read poems that appear in the context of a letter.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The two editors shared on an equal basis the work of proposing the volume to the publisher, agreeing its thematic and methodological scope, and recruiting the thirteen contributors. Their aim was to bring together different critical and scholarly approaches that would reflect a range of formal and contextual considerations, while respecting the diversity of letter writers in the Romantic period; accordingly, space is given to canonical figures (Austen, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth) as well as less well-known writers such as Mary Leadbeater and Melisina Trench. Howe and Callaghan shared the task of agreeing a remit with contributors and liaising over proposed amendments.
The volume’s breadth of methodology is reflected in essays that focus on (a) the close reading of letters (Clarkson on Wordsworth; O’Neill on Shelley), placing literary letters on a level with poetry and literary prose while interrogating that juxtaposition; (b) the epistolary culture of the period (O’Connell on the figure of the publisher; Behrendt on literary circles and salons); and (c) epistolary theory and the ‘poetics’ of the letter (Stabler on Byron’s epistolary poetics; Bennet on Keats’s intimacy). The Introduction covers both historical context and theoretical approaches to the epistolary. The historical context sections of the Introduction derived largely from the research of Howe, with the theoretical side coming more from Callaghan. Indexing and the final presentation of the manuscript were shared by the editors.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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