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.
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© 2005 Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599680_1
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