Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process, and throws new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688, and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope, and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

From the ballad-seller to the Highland bard, from 'pot-house politics' to the language of low and rustic life, the writers and artists of the British Romantic period drew eclectic inspiration from the realm of plebeian experience, even as they helped to constitute the field of popular culture as a new object of polite consumption. Representing the work of leading scholars from both Britain and North America, Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland offers a series of fascinating insights into changing representations of 'the people', while demonstrating at the same time a unifying commitment to rethinking some of the fundamental categories that have shaped our view of the Romantic period. Addressing a series of key themes, including the ballad revival, popular politics, urbanization, and literary canon-formation, the 2009 volume also contains a substantial introductory essay, which provides a wide-ranging theoretical and historical overview of the subject.

From the ballad-seller to the Highland bard, from 'pot-house politics' to the language of low and rustic life, the writers and artists of the British Romantic period drew eclectic inspiration from the realm of plebeian experience, even as they helped to constitute the field of popular culture as a new object of polite consumption. Representing the work of leading scholars from both Britain and North America, Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland offers a series of fascinating insights into changing representations of 'the people', while demonstrating at the same time a unifying commitment to rethinking some of the fundamental categories that have shaped our view of the Romantic period. Addressing a series of key themes, including the ballad revival, popular politics, urbanization, and literary canon-formation, the 2009 volume also contains a substantial introductory essay, which provides a wide-ranging theoretical and historical overview of the subject.

The Romantic age in Britain formed one of the most celebrated moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of 'political economy' as the most prestigious science of nineteenth-century capitalist society. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' investigates this historical conjunction, and challenges the influential idea that Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were implacably opposed to the abstract, individualistic view of human nature embodied in the new science of economics. This book is interdisciplinary in its scope and methods. It will be of interest to teachers and students of both English Literature and History.

The Romantic age in Britain formed one of the most celebrated--and heterogeneous--moments in literary history, but it also witnessed the rise of "political economy" as the pre-eminent nineteenth-century science of society. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' investigates this historical conjunction, and reassesses the idea that the Romantic defense of spiritual and humanistic "culture" developed as a reaction to the individualistic, philistine values of the "dismal science."
Drawing on a wide range of source material, the book combines the methods of literary scholarship and intellectual history. It addresses the changing political identifications of familiar literary figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also illuminates the wider political and intellectual life of this period.
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture' situates canonical Romantic writers within a nuanced, and highly detailed ideological context, while challenging our inherited understanding of the Romantic tradition itself as the social conscience of nineteenth-century capitalism.