Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism

Lynda Pratt's collection of specially commissioned essays is the first edited volume devoted to the multiple connections between Robert Southey (1774-1843) and English Romantic culture. A major and highly controversial personage in his own day, Southey has until recently been the forgotten member of the Lake School. Demonstrating the eclecticism of Southey's writing and the diversity of his interactions with his contemporaries, the contributors map the intersections of Southey's life and work with English culture, politics, and history, and explore his significance for the construction of Romantic and early Victorian ideologies of empire. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that Southey's significance lies not only in his own writings but in his unique ability to complicate and reconfigure traditional versions of English Romanticism and national literary history. This timely and important volume takes Southey scholarship in new directions and furthers ongoing debates about English Romanticism. As such, it is an essential resource for literary studies scholars, historians, and social scientists working on nineteenth-century literature and culture.